[gnutls-devel] symbol and library versioning
Daniel P. Berrange
berrange at redhat.com
Thu Aug 10 11:14:26 CEST 2017
On Thu, Aug 10, 2017 at 10:31:28AM +0200, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos wrote:
> Hi,
> With mind in the upcoming 3.6.0 release I tried to codify/clarify the
> library and symbol versioning rules that are considered best practice
> today.
>
> The output is at:
> https://gitlab.com/gnutls/gnutls/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md#symbol-and-library-versioning
>
> My take-away from it, is that the complexity of libtool rules is
> unnecessary and in fact all that is being used from it is the major
> soname version (thus the minor and patch versions set via libtool are
> being used by no software).
Yes, libtool versioning is not really useful, especially for a library
that intends to maintain API/ABI compat long term / forever.
> The versioning that matters is via the linker script, which is then
> used by packaging software like rpm (I guess possibly dpkg as well),
> to detect proper dependencies.
>
> Did I miss something in that? Are there are best practices I missed,
> or any issues in the rules I set above?
I believe your backporting rule is a bad idea.
"if symbol gnutls_xyz with version GNUTLS_3_6_3 is backported on
gnutls 3.3.15, it should use version GNUTLS_3_3_15."
This creates ABI breakage when you upgrade gnutls in the distro. eg
An application which links to your gnutls 3.3.15 version and uses
symbol gnutls_xyz will get a embedded symbol reference of
gnutls_xyz at GNUTLS_3_3_15. When you then update to gnutls 3.6.3 in
the distro, the linker will be unable to resolve gnutls_xyz at GNUTLS_3_3_15,
because the library will now be exporting gnutls_xyz at GNUTLS_3_6_3
instead.
There's a few other options for backporting, but they are all awful
in their own ways:
https://www.berrange.com/posts/2011/01/13/versioning-in-the-libvirt-library/
so for libvirt we simply refuse to ever backport public APIs to older
versions. Backports are for bug fixes only, never features.
Regards,
Daniel
--
|: https://berrange.com -o- https://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange :|
|: https://libvirt.org -o- https://fstop138.berrange.com :|
|: https://entangle-photo.org -o- https://www.instagram.com/dberrange :|
More information about the Gnutls-devel
mailing list