Re: please unblock libpng 1.2.15~beta5-0

[Josselin Mouette <joss@debian.org>]

Le lundi 18 décembre 2006 à 16:39 +0100, Andreas Barth a écrit :
> * Andreas Barth (aba@not.so.argh.org) [061216 22:20]:
> > I'll update this as soon as we have more information (and I would also
> > like to check the symbol lists before an upload - I'm working on this
> > right now).
> 
> Ok, more updates: The exported versions look way worse than I hoped. We
> have (looking at 1.2.8rel-1, 1.2.8rel-2, 1.2.8rel-3, 1.2.8rel-4,
> 1.2.8rel-5.1, 1.2.8rel-5.2, 1.2.8rel-6, 1.2.8rel-7, 1.2.13-4,
> 1.2.15~beta5-0, sorted from left to right, whereas 1.2.8rel-1 is in
> sarge) the following numbers of how often symbols were exported and not:
>    1 X        ++
>    2 X+++++++++
>    6 X+  +++++
>    7 X+       ++
>  125 X+
>  191 X++++++++++

Thanks for this data. To add some relevant information:
      * only the 191 symbols of the final line are stable symbols that
        are part of the API, and which stability is guaranteed across
        upgrades;
      * the 125 removed symbols in 1.2.8rel-2 are from private functions
        that are not part of any header and not used by any software;
      * the 6 symbols that were removed in 1.2.8rel-2 and added back in
        1.2.8rel-4 are part of the so-called "internal" libpng API, used
        by broken software like OptiPNG and pngcrush; I've added them
        back to keep backwards compatibility, and upstream developers of
        these software are considering to ship private copies of these
        functions (no, I don't want to argue which of these evils is the
        worst); this is why upstream doesn't ship them anymore in the
        latest version;
      * the 7 symbols that were removed in 1.2.8rel-2 then added in
        1.2.13 are probably symbols that used to be private and which
        are now part of the API;
      * as for the two top lines, I have no idea.

Cheers,
-- 
Josselin Mouette                /\./\

"Do you have any more insane proposals for me?"