RFC about cosmetic bug whith partial upgrades vs. added sy..

Hi fellow developers,

I uploaded, yesterday, a new upstream of libxml2 that adds symbol
versioning. There is actually no problem with this, and from my testing,
everything is still working as expected (the most important part being
that symbols have only been versioned, and none was removed).

Anyways, my concern is that as reverse dependencies will get built
against this new libxml2, they are going to need versioned symbols at
dynamic load time.

This appears to not be a problem either, because the dynamic loader
falls back to the unversioned symbols when the versioned symbols don't
exist, but it does emit a warning message about the fact that the
versioned symbols have not been found. It looks like it emits one such
message per symbol not found.

Now, libxml2 is used a lot. A whole lot. My concern is that partial
upgrades can possibly leave people with an old libxml2 and newer
programs (they could even put themselves in this situation by pinning
some packages), in which case these warnings are going to show up.

Do you think it would be better to force all rdeps to depend on the
newer libxml2 by the means of shlibs/symbols file so that we avoid this
possibility, or leaving this known "bug" should be fine?

Cheers,

Mike


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On Fri, 11 Sep 2009, Mike Hommey wrote:
> Now, libxml2 is used a lot. A whole lot. My concern is that partial
> upgrades can possibly leave people with an old libxml2 and newer
> programs (they could even put themselves in this situation by pinning
> some packages), in which case these warnings are going to show up.
>
> Do you think it would be better to force all rdeps to depend on the
> newer libxml2 by the means of shlibs/symbols file so that we avoid this
> possibility, or leaving this known "bug" should be fine?

The lesser-user-annoyance path is to use shlibs to force any new packages to
have a versioned dep on the libxml2-with-symbol-versions pacakges, yes.

--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh


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