Axel Thimm wrote:
> Oh, my middle name is mass rebuild. This is yet another feature I was
> driving for in Fedora, to have scheduled mass rebuilds to do away with
> issues like this and others, but mass rebuilds were consdiered only to
> be done for really big changes (gcc for example). You can try to bring
> it up though. Currently there are just no mass rebuilds.
IMHO it only makes sense to rebuild packages if there is a good reason to.
Mass-rebuilding packages which have broken dependencies due to a soname
bump is a no-brainer, mass-rebuilding packages for a new GCC also makes
sense, mass-rebuilding packages just to mass-rebuild them is a rather
pointless exercise.
> A bumbed soname usually implies an API change. Some libs can be deep
> in the depdency hierarchy. The issues have been recognized by now also
> in Fedora due to the sheer size of it and we do have the first
> incarnation libfoo-compat. This is just the first step to an versioned
> libfoo<somark>.
Compat packages are the exception rather than the rule and should be done
only where they're really needed (i.e. the API changed and packages cannot
be easily ported to the current API). They have drawbacks which make them a
bad idea when avoidable:
* symbol clashes if a program somehow ends up with both versions linked
indirectly. Especially with things like plugins, this can happen more
easily than you think. (For example, a GTK+ program which links KDE 3
libraries for desktop integration will crash when used with the Qt 4
gtk-qt-engine. I've seen that happen with packages in the CalcForge repo.
Of course qt3/kdelibs3 is an example of an unavoidable compat package set,
but it does show that symbol clashes are a real issue.)
* risk of file conflicts, especially for the -devel packages (the .so
symlink is almost guaranteed to clash, we have scary hacks to work around
that for the KDE libs).
> For example ffmpeg or similar packages would require almost a third of
> ATrpms' package to be rebuilt.
Yeah, ffmpeg is a particularly annoying library due to its notorious
ABI-unstability and its heavy use in the multimedia world (because it has
really no equals when it comes to support for patent-encumbered formats).
I'll grant you that point.
But that doesn't explain why e.g. libquicktime which has been at .so.0 since
forever is using soname-based naming.
Kevin Kofler
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