Terry Barnaby wrote:
> I really strongly disagree that ABI interfaces of the mainly used
> shared libraries could be allowed to change in a "stable" release.
> We develop internal applications that are packaged and go out to a few
> users. We use Fedora primarily as an OS to run applications we need
> rather than an experimentation platform.
Then you as the provider of those applications are responsible for
rebuilding them.
> I consider it unacceptable for a system "update" to break the
> ABI for these and any other third-party packages. It would mean failures
> in the field that would require live intervention. This is what
> rawhide is for.
> We would end up by turning off Fedora updating on these systems and in
> effect manage the updates of the system ourselves probably from our own
> repository (our own Fedora spin) or, probably move to a different system.
> I am sure a lot of users, like us, use Fedora for there own purposes and
> develop there own applications for it, but do not maintain them in the
> main Fedora package tree. There's more to Fedora than just the main Fedora
> repository...
Why are you using the conditional tense? Fedora CURRENTLY does NOT provide
any ABI guarantees. There ARE ALREADY updates which change the ABI (you
recognize them as they are normally grouped with rebuilds of other stuff for
the bumped ABI). The people who want to change things are the ones who DON'T
want to allow soname bumps. The only reason the core libraries you use are
apparently not affected is that those libraries are used by so many packages
that rebuilding them all would be impractical.
That said, this also leads to a possible solution: we could make a short
list of "core" libraries for which soname bumps would be impractical to
perform in a release, which would then also double as some form of ABI
guarantee.
Kevin Kofler
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