Re: Revert curl change made for flash

[Matthew Garrett <mjg redhat com>]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 09:35:27AM -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-08-12 at 16:00 +0300, Nikolay Vladimirov wrote:
> > The change just provides some backward compatibility. It's minimal. 
> > I really think it's not important why the change was made. Since it
> > doesn't break anything and it doesn't waste disk space. It may be
> > useful for some dead opensource projects that use the older version. 
> 
> There are better ways to do this.  Providing a compat-curl package is
> the proper way.  The way it was done now is just a hack with the sole
> intention of making flash work again.

If the ABI is consistent across the SONAME bump, then it's a hack that 
supports any pre-existing binaries that users have. The best way we 
could serve those users with a compat package would be to ship another 
copy of the latest version of curl (so they get the bugfixes) but with a 
changed SONAME - at which point we'd be shipping two identical source 
packages that produce binary packages that differ only in library name. 
In doing so, we'd be increasing the cost of security updates.

What does that actually win us?
-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 srcf ucam org