Re: [Evolution-hackers] EDS ABI changes in 2.24?!

[Rob Bradford <rob robster org uk>]

On Sat, 2008-10-04 at 10:57 +0200, Patrick Ohly wrote:
> Hello!

> A user just alerted me of the fact that he cannot use the precompiled
> SyncEvolution binaries on Ubuntu Intrepid, which ships Evolution 2.24.
> The reason is that the version of libedataserver was bumped from
> current/revision/age 10/0/1 to 11/0/0 as part of the r8703 commit (log
> message quoted below).
> 
> Why was it necessary to break backwards compatibility? The log message
> doesn't say. It mentions that some code was moved into a new library
> (libebackend?), but that alone doesn't necessarily break the backward
> compatibility: libedataserver1.2 could have been linked against
> libebackend. That way any symbol originally provided by
> libedataserver1.2-9 would still have been found. It doesn't matter in
> which library the symbol really is, because both libraries would be
> loaded and searched automatically.

For reference the bug in question is #465374. If we had linked
libedataserver to libebackend we'd still have the same licensing
problem.

> Is there still a chance to mitigate the effect of this change?
> Downgrading the version as suggested above would be the most obvious
> solution, but unfortunately libedataserver-1.2.so.11 has been released
> already :-/
> 
> Another solution would be to create a libedataserver-1.2.so.9 symlink as
> part of the EDS installation. But then packagers still would have to be
> aware of it and declare that the package provides
> libedataserver-1.2.so.9.

I don't think that Debian/Ubuntu would find this acceptable. I expect
other distributions would also have objections.

> 
> Can such ABI changes please be discussed on this list? I'm interested to
> hear about them beforehand and won't notice them if they are only
> discussed on IRC or in a bug tracker entry; there may be others in the
> same position. Thanks!

Sounds like a good idea.

Cheerio,

Rob