Plan for Today's (20070625) Release Engineering meeting

[Axel Thimm]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 09:25:45AM -0400, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-06-26 at 15:26 +0200, Axel Thimm wrote:
> 
> > > 
> > > Care to provide a concrete example of a symbol that has been added in a
> > > stable series, breaking applications ? I can't think of any. 
> > 
> > http://www.google.com/search?q=g_assert_warning
> > (2,460 which all seem to discuss the missing symbol in various higher
> > stack packages)
> > 
> > And according to the changelog you should be aware of that:
> 
> Oh, I am aware of g_assert_warning. But it is not the example I asked
> you for, since it was added in 2.5.3, in the middle of a development
> series. That is not something that you will see in a released Fedora,
> unless something unforeseen happens.

But it made its way into the stable release nonetheless (there are
very few references to odd versions in the google results above, and I
know for sure I never used a development release when I encounterd
this at ATrpms), so whether there was historically a development cycle
doesn't matter, comparing the stable releases matters and the fact
remains that:

o Two different stable releases had a different set of symbols
o These two stable releases had the same soname
o One stable release (the younger one) was ABI-wise a superset of the
  older one

So all these together give: There is backward compatibility in this
project (OK), but certainly no forward compatibility (also OK, nobody
and his cat even less care about forward compatibility, so why should
you).

And that brings up back to:

o no ensured forward compatibility in libraries
o still same soname
o rpm and anything higher can't detect any lack of forward
  compatibility to force pulling in later versions of libraries

Leading utlimatively again to

o A security-updates repo can only be built against itself (itself =
  release + itself).
-- 
Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net
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