[Fedora-packaging] Re: Use of Internal Libraries

[Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski]

On Saturday, 20 September 2008 at 11:31, Axel Thimm wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 07:55:38PM +0200, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> > > Note I mentioned the API, which is still changing on a regular
> > > basis. For ffmpeg it doesn't actually help that there are no releases
> > > ever either.
> > 
> > API is not changing on a regular basis either. If there are incompatible
> > changes, they are accompanied by a major version bump.
> 
> The soname changes are for the ABI changes, the API does change more
> than often.
> 
> > > > without bumping the major version of the affected library. The
> > > > pkg-config support is put properly in place, too, so if you haven't
> > > > done that already, it's high time to begin convincing depdendent
> > > > projects to start supporting shared FFmpeg. I've already begun
> > > > working on fixing the main consumer of FFmpeg, MPlayer, to do that.
> > > 
> > > Unless ffmpeg actually releases anything again I doubt that too many
> > > projects will try to depend on an external shared lib whose API
> > > stability window is a few weeks.
> > 
> > Actually most of what we have in livna/rpmfusion does work with external
> > shared libs. And the API stability window is rather closer to 3 years.
> 
> So the recent moving of the header files which is part of the API was
> three years ago and not that summer?

While I agree that moving headers around is an API change, it is far less
problematic than changing function or structure names. It did bring
a long needed consistency to header locations, after all.

> Everything that requires an upstream's intervention to make a library
> link again is API breakage.

Linking was unaffected by that change.

> If the consumer app FTBFS it's an API breakage.

Well, it was trivial to fix.

Regards,
R.

-- 
Fedora http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Rathann
Livna http://rpm.livna.org | MPlayer http://mplayerhq.hu
"Faith manages."
        -- Delenn to Lennier in Babylon 5:"Confessions and Lamentations"