Re: potential tiff transition, tiff 4.0.0 strategy

[Jay Berkenbilt <qjb@debian.org>]

Julien Cristau <jcristau@debian.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 09:02:50 -0500, Jay Berkenbilt wrote:
>
>> So, what is the recommendation of the release team?  If you agree that
>> we should do a transition as soon as possible after the final 4.0.0 is
>> released (so that wheezy can have 4.x), do you have any guesses as to
>> when you would be ready for an upload?
>>
> FWIW, I think it should be required for such a library to use versioned
> symbols if it doesn't care to keep its ABI stable.

While I agree in principle, this is the first ABI change in the over 10
years since I've been using the library, and no others are planned for
the foreseeable future.  (There was an accidental ABI change in 2003,
but they are much more careful now, and even if upstream messes up, I
and others on the upstream mailing list call them on it and it gets
fixed.)  The ABI change was the result of a revised specification to the
TIFF file format (support of bigtiff), and this doesn't happen very
often.  While the TIFF ABI is not absolutely set in stone, I would
hardly say it's not stable.  There is very little effort on the tiff
libraries upstream right now, and the library is very stable and in wide
use, so there's basically no chance that upstream is going to do this.
I don't have the bandwidth to do it just for the debian packages, and I
also don't think it's worth the effort since no ABI changes are likely
for years.

I'm planning on uploading the new version to unstable but not having it
provide libtiff-dev until I hear from the release time how the
transition should be handled.  That way at least those packages that are
already including their own copies of the tiff 4.x source code can stop
doing it, but there won't be any accidental dependencies on multiple
versions.

-- 
Jay Berkenbilt <qjb@debian.org>