Re: [Caml-list] binary compatibility of 3.08.3
On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 03:02:39PM -0800, Jacques Garrigue wrote:
> From: Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@debian.org>
>
> > On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 05:53:07PM +0100, Damien Doligez wrote:
> > > Or you can wait a few weeks for 3.08.3.
> >
> > BTW, do 3.08.3 break binary compatibility with 3.08.2?
> > (as happened when upgrading from 3.08.1 to 3.08.2)
>
> Any bug fix in the compiler has a very high probability of breaking
> binary compatibility. This is due to the fact interface digests depend
> on the indices of internal identifiers, so that purely internal
> changes may break compatibility, eventhough the cmi format is left
> unchanged.
> It is reasonnable to assume that 3.08.3 will not be binary compatible.
Notice that this is really not nice for a bugfix release, since this means we
have to rebuild all of the ocaml related packages on all arches, which may
take us month and such. Maybe we would be better off just backporting the
non-breaking fixes ? Maybe in future this situation could be somewhat improved ?
> By the way, due to a bug fix in the variance inference, it will also
> not be 100% source compatible, but I hope this has no impact on
> existing programs (as only few programs use variance). (I sincerely
> hope there were no unsound programs around...)
Oh, well. ...
Friendly,
Sven Luther
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