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Cascading security updatesCascading security updatesPosted Feb 28, 2008 4:23 UTC (Thu) by magnus (subscriber, #34778)Parent article: Cascading security updates
A good example of ABI backwards-compatibility is GTK+, which is still compatible back to version 2.0, released 6-7 years ago. I wish more effort was made on ABI forward-compatibility (symbol versioning), which very few libraries seem to care about. Without it, you have to build your program against the oldest version of the library that you depend on to get a portable binary. This would also make things like distribution upgrades a lot safer and more flexible (like being able to upgrade one package at a time).
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Cascading security updates Posted Feb 28, 2008 10:56 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] Symbol versioning doesn't help there unless your applications explicitly state which versions of symbols they use (which none do because it's so annoying). Instead they implicitly rely on a GNU extension whereby a symbol with a @@ between name and version (rather than a single @) becomes the default version and is used if none is specified. This is invariably the latest symbol version available for that library. So you don't gain backcompat: what you gain is forward-compat (until you relink, anyway).
Cascading security updates Posted Feb 29, 2008 20:14 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] Symbol versioning actually makes the backward compatibility problem worse. Take an old program foo.c and compile it on your new system. Transport the program to an old system, and it won't run. That's because it calls baz(), which at compile/link time turned into a reference to the new Version 2 of baz().Without symbol versioning, baz() designers would instead introduce a new baz2(), and maintain compatible header files for baz(), and the old foo.c would be unaffected. Furthermore, a coder of a new foo.c might see in the manual that baz2() is a recent invention, and thus write foo.c to use the more ubiquitous baz(). It's hard to expect a coder to use explicit symbol versions the same way. Last, but not least, the error message you get when you try to run that newly compiled foo.c on the old system is very cryptic, even to a seasoned software engineer.
Cascading security updates Posted Feb 28, 2008 13:10 UTC (Thu) by davecb (subscriber, #1574) [Link] There's a classic discussion of ABI maintainability by Paul Stachour (which I typed in) at Multicians.ORG: http://www.multicians.org/stachour.html --dave
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