The future of Linux - architecture and package inter-dependencies

[Patrice Dumas]

> > How are you willing to help?
> 
> Good question, I thought that this discussion was a start.
> This is a task that requires influencing, management and enterprise
> architecture skills other than time. It must be a team work to succeed. Is
> there a team that I could join? Would a team have to be formed?

As allready said, what needs to be influenced are the individual projects.
There is nothing like a team that tries to help keep api and abi stable
for all the projects and it is dubious that forming one would make sense.

If you find that some library has a stable binary interface that is kept 
across versions and is used by most applications, and is mixed with a 
changing interface, then you could help by providing library version 
scripts to these libraries. This could potentially solve the api/abi
change issue. As I said allready this would, for example benefit to 
openmotf/lesstif, because most apps compiled against openmotif use a 
stable subset of the api/abi. But openmotif isn't even free software, 
so...

Here are sources of information, with the relevant part of the ld manual:

http://www.gnu.org/software/binutils/manual/ld-2.9.1/html_node/ld_25.html#SEC25

A generic resource I found on that subject:

http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/als00/2000papers/papers/full_papers/browndavid/browndavid_html/

There are many other sources of incompatibility than abi/api changes,
but abi/apip changes seemed to be on your list.

--
Pat