Re: [fluid-dev] SONAME Bump?

[Andrew Suffield]

On Sat, Aug 06, 2011 at 12:54:20PM +0200, David Henningsson wrote:
> As reported in ticket #98, FluidSynth 1.1.4 dropped one symbol.
> However, this symbol (fluid_defsfont_get_sample) is not part of the
> public API, so no programs should use it anyway.
> 
> I don't know how much of a big deal this is, really. Can you help me
> determine that, and the proper action for it?
> 
> Is it something that alone calls for a new release (1.1.5) or can we
> just update svn? What implications does bumping the SONAME have?

Changing the SONAME field implies that things using the library must
be recompiled against the new version, and would break if used against
the old one. Whether this is merited here depends on what you think
about applications using that symbol. It would break them obviously
while rebuilding, rather than at runtime (potentially long after the
application starts).

> IMO, the ideal would be if we could tell gcc to stop exporting all
> symbols that are not part of the public API. Then we would get rid
> of this problem altogether. Is that possible?

Yes, you want to add a version script for the linker. Since you're
using libtool, I think you can avoid messing around with the tricky
platform-specific details by using the -export-symbols argument. (I
know it does the right thing on glibc-elf platforms; haven't tried it
on others, and some platforms simply don't have this feature)