ccan dependencies seems to break external projects

Rusty Russell rusty at ozlabs.org
Tue Feb 21 15:11:24 MST 2012


On Mon, 13 Feb 2012 08:04:14 -0500, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh at redhat.com> wrote:
> I don't think that encoding the version number in the library is a
> sufficient answer since, as discussed earlier in this thread, it is
> possible to build subsets of CCAN. This would presumably be the same
> library version but would be notably missing some components and
> therefore ABI-incompatible with an application linked against it.

Hi Stephen,

        Thanks for bringing these issues up.  It's important to figure
out how to solve this not just for SAMBA, but for advice to other
complex CCAN-using projects in future.

> There really only seem like two options:
> 1) CCAN needs to be modified so that we always build ALL components of
> it into a shared library. Ideally we would do this upstream with CCAN
> (and not privately in samba). Then we could have upstream release
> tarballs with a defined version that samba should then link against. I'm
> aware that Samba likes to have the ability to also build it in-tree, but
> that's a secondary concern. This option allows distributions to package
> a system library version of ccan (which is the preferred approach for
> most distributions, since it allows easy upgrades to fix bugs and
> security issues across all platforms).

Making CCAN a versioned library is messy.  Upstream, CCAN is simply a
collection of code snippets with no set API, let alone ABI.  That
decision is up to individual module authors.

This means SAMBA would be bumping the SO major version on every change
we import, or make the fork permanent, which would be painful and make
it harder to grab future CCAN modules.

> 2) If CCAN truly cannot be built as a common library (like libreplace
> cannot), then the only correct answer should be to disallow ever
> building it as a shared object. We should allow only static linking (or
> pure copylib, like libreplace). If we're going purely copylib, we should
> remove the build-system entirely so that it can only be used by
> incorporating it into the Makefile/WAF build of its consumers. In other
> words, we should make it impossible to produce a system library or
> shared object that could ever conflict with the internal version.
> 
> I'm personally in favor of option 1 if it is at all possible.

I don't know how to do this :( (Note that as of yesterday, there are
significant changes to the tdb2 build, and it's now a public library.  I
don't know if that changes anything).

If the problem is that (unlike samba-util) it's used by public libraries
(ie. tdb2), then we can wean tdb2 off CCAN, copying in the bits we need.
It's ugly, but has the benefit of making tdb2 entirely self-contained.

Or we can go part way, and librify some CCAN modules; ccan/hash has had
a particularly stable API, for example, and it's the largest one used by
tdb2.  For this, I'd want to add checks to ccanlint to try to ensure ABI
stability so it doesn't accidentally get broken, but it's possible.

Thanks,
Rusty.


More information about the samba-technical mailing list