OT: dependency and ABI mismanagement

Posted Oct 7, 2010 9:58 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (guest, #1159)
In reply to: OT: dependency and ABI mismanagement by paulj
Parent article: Carrez: The real problem with Java in Linux distros

My point about applications was when they make use of multiple libraries providing GTK widgets.

Since this thread started on evolution-data-server, consider an application using one of the widgets from the libedataserverui library. If GTK broke the ABI of GtkWidget, you would need a new version of the libedataserverui widgets to use with the new GtkWidget ABI. If that was not available, then your app would need to use the old GTK ABI.

As I said previously these sort of ABI breakages are quite painful, so effort is made to avoid them. For GTK itself we've maintained compatibility for 8 years, so it certainly is possible (although is a bit painful at times).

Would it be nice if evolution-data-server went through fewer ABI breakages? Sure, but I don't think symbol versioning would solve the problem.