[gnutls-devel] Symbol versioning in gnutls broken -> crashes

[Andreas Metzler]

On 2014-09-12 Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos <nmav at gnutls.org> wrote:
> On Fri, 2014-09-12 at 18:22 +0200, Andreas Metzler wrote:
[Debian GnuTLS v3 package use a different ABI and soname than
upstream]
>> It will therefore continue to be broken until GnuTLS upstream bumps
>> the symbol-versioning (and the soname) and Debian picks up this
>> version. 

> Indeed, but the ABI in 3.x is fixed since years and will remain fixed
> for years too; there is no plan to change it. Why not change the ABI in
> the old releases as a work around? Having a different ABI in the latest
> release ensures that debian will remain binary incompatible with any
> software build with modern gnutls for the foreseeable future.

Hello,

GnuTLS 2.x is part of the current Debian stable release ("wheezy" aka
7.6). There is simply no way to retroactively change the gnutls ABI
in wheezy and rebuild all packages in it. And because of partial
upgrades GnuTLS 2.x in wheezy and GnuTLS 3.x in wheezy+1 (the soon to
be frozen "jessie") will need to be co-installable without breaking
each other.

It is theorethically possible to do a transition and switch back to the
upstream GnuTLS 3.x ABI for the next-next Debian release, but I doubt
that it is really worth the trouble because of the timeframe. Debian
jessie+1 will probably be released in 2017. The additional transition
will also complicate things for Debian derivatives (like Ubuntu) who
have a different release cycle.

cu Andreas
-- 
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