the sorry saga of the talloc soname 'fix'

[Steve Langasek]

On Tue, Jul 07, 2009 at 01:17:20PM +1000, tridge at samba.org wrote:
> The people who package the libs, such as Simo does for RedHat, are of
> course free to put whatever hacks they like in their own versions. If
> he wants to add symbol versioning or backwards compatibility hacks
> then that is completely up to him. That is part of the life of library
> maintainers. It is not reasonable to push those hacks on the upstream
> source.

Symbol versioning is not a hack.  Shared library implementations that lack
support for symbol versioning are deficient because of precisely the problem
being described in this thread.  Use of symbol versions should be the
standard for all shared libraries on systems that support them, and should
be *mandatory* for any libraries which are used by other libraries.

Which means that the symbol versioning belongs in the upstream library, not
pushed down on the packagers where a dozen different distributions will have
to reimplement the same thing, with a high risk of introducing binary
incompatibilities (by picking different symbol version names).  If it comes
to it, I will gladly coordinate with Simo to ensure Debian and Ubuntu wind
up with the same symbol versioning implementation as Red Hat, but symbol
versions are part of a library's ABI and are best dealt with upstream, not
by packagers.

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org