[libvirt] [libvirt-glib] Debian, symbol versioning & ABI breakage

[Christophe Fergeau]

Hey,

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=673430 has recently been
brought to my attention. The Debian gnome-boxes package was failing to
startup because it had been compiled against an older libvirt-glib version
than the one that was installed on the system.
So far, we have broken the ABI for each libvirt-glib release, and done that
by changing the version of all symbols in libvirt-g*.syms. This works well
on Fedora where rpm adds requires like
libvirt-gobject-1.0.so.0(LIBVIRT_GOBJECT_0.0.8)(64bit) when building the
package, thus preventing using gnome-boxes with an older/newer libvirt-glib
build than the one it was compiled against.
However, debian doesn't seem to take into account symbol versioning at all
in their package dependencies, and rely on the library soname changing to
detect ABI breakage.

In short, the way we've handled ABI breakage so far is unnice to Debian ;)
In my opinion, we should be aiming to make libvirt-glib ABI stable soon, so
this issue shouldn't happen again soon, but I'm mentioning it for future
reference ;)

Christophe
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