[gnutls-dev] gnutls versioning again

[Andreas Metzler]

On 2007-02-18 "Dmitry V. Levin" <ldv at altlinux.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 18, 2007 at 05:56:30PM +0100, Andreas Metzler wrote:
[...]
> > However
> > it seems to be a rather big hammer. And the problem is old, I think I
> > am missing something _big_, the majority of libraries does
> > not use symbol versioning,

> Probably because symbol versioning is not portable.
> Most of libraries which use symbol versioning are maintained by
> GNU/Linux developers.

> > rpm based distributions must already have
> > some different way to handle adding of symbols to libraries and
> > generating the necessary dependencies.

> Besides of the the method we are talking about, there are no reliable
> methods I'm aware of.  rpm based distributions usually follow reactive
> strategy: when application package fails to run with some library
> package, they just rebuild application package with verioned dependency on
> library package which is known to work nice with this application package.
[...]

I don't understand how /that/ could help. The problem as I see it is
that the dependencies of the program on the library are unversioned and
therefore allow installing the program with a too old version of the
library. Rebuilding would not change the dependency and would not fix
the problem.

cu andreas