Re: dpkg flex-based status file parser, for 35% speedup

[Guillem Jover <guillem@debian.org>]

On Fri, 2007-08-31 at 14:54:51 +0100, Ian Jackson wrote:
> Guillem Jover writes ("Re: dpkg flex-based status file parser, for 35% speedup"):
> > I've just prepared a patch which switches the library to be shared
> > one (I'm missing adding a version script), for now we'd only provide
> > libdpkg0 (and probably libdpkg0-dbg), and no libdpkg-dev, as the lib
> > should be considered private as it is now.
> 
> That's not correct.  The problem is that since libdpkg has no stable
> ABI, it is not safe to mix /usr/bin/dpkg from one version of dpkg.deb
> with your /usr/lib/libdpkg.so from another.  If dpkg were interrupted
> halfway through updating itself, the system might be irrecoverably
> broken.

That's what versioned symbols are for. Although thinking about it a
bit more, adding the overhead of maintaining the library using them
when the interfaces are not stable at all, might be too high at this
point of time, for the additional few 100 KiBs. I'd probably go with
the original plan of starting a new empty library and moving stuff
piece by piece.

regards,
guillem