Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 18, 2010 15:04 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313)
In reply to: Applications and bundled libraries by jengelh
Parent article: Applications and bundled libraries

If $distro ships libevent2-1.4.9 for example, there are two choices:
1. you need libevent.so.2-1.4.10: fine, make it a dependency of chromium and let the distro update their libevent2.

What happens if libevent.so.2-1.4.10 breaks some other application? There are surprising number of applications that actually depend even on specific bugs being present in a library (because e.g. the bug was there years ago and they've implemented a workaround which will be broken by the proper fix)...

Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 18, 2010 15:28 UTC (Thu) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link] (2 responses)

If a new release of a library alters behaviour in a backwards-incompatible way, then the SONAME
is bumped (that is, going from libevent.so.2 to libevent.so.3 in the example).

Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 19, 2010 11:30 UTC (Fri) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (1 responses)

Yeah, for major changes. For minor ones (like the aforementioned bug workarounds), symbol versioning is a much better choice.

Applications and bundled libraries

Posted Mar 19, 2010 11:36 UTC (Fri) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link]

Symbol versioning would not work in this case, I think, because as you recompile $broken_program (which can easily happen in things like rawhide/factory), you are linking it against $new_symbol.