On 2019-12-25 18:08, Chen-Tse Tsai wrote:
> Thanks Andreas and Christian for the updates/comments. I agree that I
> should have been more verbose in the changelog. I'm tracing all the
> commits to learn more about packaging. I was playing with gbp for
> updating upstream. I really like how it works with git! No worries, my
> time was not wasted anyway.
If you like gbp, then it's already a team win :-)
>
> I talked to Christian briefly about the symbol file. He added one for
> liblinear4. I have a question about this file. The symbol file I
> generated looks a bit different from liblinear4.symbols, in which
> several lines start with (c++) and contain the exact parameters. I
> couldn't figure out how to make dpkg-gensymbols produce this.
Yeah, the C++ symbols generated are the mangled versions. You need to
unmangle them by piping the generated file through c++filt, and then add
the (c++) prefix to tell dpkg-gensymbols about this. The
UsingSymbolsFiles [1] page has a practical example on the bottom.
The c++filt(1) and dpkg-gensymbols(1) man pages have theoretical
background on this, but TBH, I don't think it's needed.
There are voices that say that symbols files for C++ libraries are
overly hard to maintain, but in case of this specific upstream, I didn't
have a negative experience, and it did help me detect breaking changes a
few times.
[1] https://wiki.debian.org/UsingSymbolsFiles