[Pkg-octave-devel] No symbols files
Hi,
if you look at the commits I just pushed into git, you'll notice that
all symbol files are gone. I've decided to go with shlibs instead, for
the reasons stated in
http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/journal/2012-02/001.html
The following paragraph from that blog entry sums it up pretty much, so
I'll quote it here in case the blog vanishes:
"In the end, I reverted the changes and have gone back to not providing
a symbols file, and instead just using shlibs. Some of this is because
of the general state of the available tools, and some of it is due to
the nature of the packages I was working on. This set of packages has
frequent SONAME bumps from upstream, so backward compatibility across
Debian stable versions can't happen anyway. They also don't use symbol
export control, which means that the number of exported symbols is quite
large and contains a lot of things leaked from internal objects."
Now, it's arguable whether Octave's 'once in 2 years' SONAME change is
frequent, but it happens often enough that we will rarely ship with the
same SONAME in two stable releases.
Previous to the above blog post, Russ started a discussion in
debian-devel at
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/01/msg00671.html,
which is also worth a read.
Anyway, if the buildds build the current package, the next step will be
our helper package and then 2-3 octave-forge packages as guinea pigs to
experimental.
Thomas
Reply to: