On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 08:05:28AM +0000, Terry Barnaby wrote: > On 12/03/10 03:42, Kevin Kofler wrote: > > Chris Adams wrote: > >> There's a difference between not supporting third-party software (is > >> that actually documented somewhere or another Kevin Kofler rule?) and > >> intentionally breaking it. > > > > There's no policy saying we support it, ergo by default, we don't. > > > > And we don't intentionally break it, we upgrade a library for some good > > reason (there's always a good reason why a soname bump gets pushed) and that > > happens to break some third-party software we don't and can't know about. > > (When we do, e.g. for software in RPM Fusion, we alert the affected > > maintainers so they can rebuild their packages.) > > > > For example, Firefox security updates are impossible to do without ABI > > breaks in xulrunner. > > > > Kevin Kofler > > > 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. > 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... > While I agree with the sentiment that we should try not to break ABI; I do have to repeat -- Fedora does not require maintaines to backport fixes. That means that Fedora will break ABI in a release if there is a good reason to include the new upstream version. (security fix, bugfix that is deemed worthy, probably not simply for a new feature... but features may be the reason an ABI breaks when we pull in a new upstream release to fix a bug and the release includes it.) If you really find this unacceptable, there's two options: A) Fedora requires backports for problems that break ABI. Note that this also means that Fedora may need to have people who create non-upstreamable patches to software since some upstream fixes may require ABI changes and we'd need to fix those a different way. B) You use a different distribution. -Toshio
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