Qt4 challenges, abi breakage, abi restore, ...
Hi!
As discussed with some release team members (who told me to bring it up
here), we are having a slight issue with qt4.
We thought qt4.4 broke the abi on mips* compared to qt4.3. This is still
the case.
But we now discovered that qt4.3 broke the abi compared to qt4.2
(released with etch) and qt4.4 actually restores that abi.
The abi breakage is the heavy used qt datatype called "qreal", which on
mipsen is double in 4.2, float in 4.3 and double in 4.4. (and as this is
c++, it is abi breaking changes)
The current package in experimental is prepared for a abi-breaking,
no-soname change package renaming transition (dropping libqt4-core
package name). (qt4.4 is still not released)
We are also using this opportunity to do big changes in the qt4.4
packaging. (splitting the original libqt4-core package into a bit more
pieces, like putting dbus stuff in a seperate package)
So what to do in this case?
1) Go on as a full library transition?
2) introduce a libqt4-core transitional package and ignoring abi changes,
as it actually is a abi revert?
3) Something else?
Questions welcome. I expect we have a couple of weeks to figure out what
to do.
/Sune
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