Re: ABI Compatibility (was Re: Installation woes for the average user...)

[Yavor Doganov]

Richard Frith-Macdonald wrote:
> On 20 May 2009, at 20:54, Yavor Doganov wrote:
> > If I understand correctly, you say that between 1.13 and 1.19 (for
> > example) not all soname bumps were warranted.
> 
> No that's absolutely *not* what I said.
> 
> I pointed out that the large majority of the recent base library  
> releases (including the latest one) did *not* change the soname!

I feel we are miscommunicating.  Let me try to clear this out -- I am
counting only the major releases when there was a soname bump; the
regular point releases are not interesting for this discussion.

Debian Etch (aka "oldstable" now, released Apr 2007) shipped with Base
1.13.0.  Debian Lenny (aka "stable", released Feb 2009) shipped with
1.16.1 (1.16.3 was out before the final distro release, but we were
deep frozen).  The system I'm writing this message on is gNewSense
(based on Ubuntu Hardy), released May 2008 and has 1.14.1:

$ objdump -p /usr/lib/libgnustep-base.so | grep SONAME
  SONAME      libgnustep-base.so.1.14

Debian Squeeze (aka "testing") has 1.16.3, Debian sid has 1.19.0 and
we're at the end of a classic GNUstep transition now (gnustep-base
1.16->1.19 and gnustep-gui/back 0.14->0.16).

1.13.0 was released on 2006-08-28 according to the ChangeLog entry, so
for less than 3 years you put your word that you broke the ABI 6
times?  That's astonishing given the fact that Base is advertised as a
fairly stable library (and *it is*, more or less).

There were API breaks for sure as we had to patch packages to make
them build again through the years.  Most probably there were ABI
breaks too -- but 6 for such period?  Don't get me wrong, break the
API/ABI as much as you want.  All I'm asking for is to bump the SONAME
only when you really break the latter.  It is an entirely redundant
action otherwise.