Re: libxft for lenny
On Sun, Feb 11, 2007 at 02:36:30AM +0100, Julien Cristau wrote:
> xft upstream stopped exporting a bunch of internal symbols in 2.1.9 [1],
> which strictly speaking means we should have to bump the ABI. libxft2
> had 307 reverse-dependencies in sid/main/i386 last I checked, though, so
> transitioning to libxft3 doesn't seem like something we really want to
> do.
> So I checked all reverse dependencies in sid/main/ia64 on merkel, and it
> seems that none of them use any of the removed symbols. Upstream didn't
> bump the ABI either, so I guess they're pretty confident these symbols
> aren't being used anywhere. libXft 2.1.9 was released in June last
> year, one symbol was reexported in 2.1.12 in December [1], and the
> upstream bugzilla doesn't seem to mention further breakage, so it seems
> to me that upgrading to 2.1.12 should be safe.
> I wanted to check with the release team first, though, and have your
> opinion on whether we should go ahead with the new upstream (after etch
> is out, of course), by:
> - bumping the ABI and deal with the transition with aggressive
> binNMUing,
> - uploading xft 2.1.12 as-is, with the symbols dropped, hoping for the
> best, and possibly readding some symbols individually if there's some
> breakage,
> - or reverting the unexporting of the internal xft symbols.
Were any of these symbols ever exposed in the published headers? If not,
then I think it's pretty clear-cut that the symbols are internal and can be
safely dropped without worrying about ABI breakage.
If some of these symbols were exposed in the headers, it's less clear; even
if no Debian packages use them, there could still be third-party software
that does, so bumping the soname is still the right thing to do. But
there's sure to be resistance upstream from those indoctrinated into the Red
Hat school of library management, as there was for freetype, so the path of
least resistance would probably be to leave the soname alone, "hoping for
the best".
Cheers,
--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
vorlon@debian.org http://www.debian.org/
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