Re: [Rawhide] gawk API changes heads up

[Pavel Raiskup]

On Tuesday, October 31, 2017 2:56:59 PM CET David Kaspar [Dee'Kej] wrote:
>  Hello folks! :)
>  
>  The new major version of GNU awk (gawk) was released recently, and this
>  version introduced a new API (version 2.0). I want to give all of you a
>  heads up that I'm planning to do a rebase in Rawhide next week (probably on
>  Tuesday, November 7th, if everything goes OK).
>  
>  If you have any gawk extension (or you somehow depend on gawk internals in
>  your packages), then you will have to update your packages so they are able
>  to work properly during runtime (with the new ABI).
>  
>  On the other hand, I do not think we have so many extensions of gawk in
>  Fedora. Most of the packages depending on gawk (see below) probably uses
>  the gawk for its text processing capabilities. :)
>  
>  In any case, I have recently introduced (in gawk-4.1.4-7) the 'gawk(abi)'
>  in the gawk's specfile:
>  > Provides:         gawk(abi) = %{gawk_api_major}.%{gawk_api_minor}
>  
>  If your package requires a specific API version, then you can require that
>  version in your package's specfile as you need. Once you have this in
>  place, the users shouldn't be able to update to newer version of gawk, if
>  it would break the ABI compatibility. 
Per upstream announcement [1], I think the API change is related to extensions
only, so the only affected package (in Fedora Rawhide) is IMO gawk-xml.
There's btw. something like (so new package):

    Requires: gawk(abi) >= %{gawk_api_version}
    Requires: gawk(abi) < %(echo %{gawk_api_version} | gawk -F. '{printf
"%d.0\n", $1+1}')

I would encourage you to standardize the way how the gawk(abi) is obtained from
existing installation so the extension providers don't have to do such ugly
hacks...  and also, I doubt rebuild of any other package is needed.

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/gnu.announce/Ax9-4K-JIvM

Pavel


>  ---------------------
>  
>  Last thing I have in my mind regarding the upcoming rebase - should we
>  schedule a mass-rebuild for the packages listed below, to see if they build
>  correctly with the latest version of gawk? If they wouldn't, we could file
>  the new FTBFS BZs for it. Thoughts? Comments? :)
>  
>  ---------------------
>  
>  List of packages requiring gawk (it might not be complete, it was extracted
>  from some quick dnf query):
>  
>  akmods
>  am-utils
>  autoconf213
>  autofs
>  calamares
>  ceph-selinux
>  checksec
>  cloud-utils
>  cloud-utils-growpart
>  copr-backend
>  ctdb
>  dhcp-client-12
>  dkms
>  docbook-utils
>  e2fsprogs-devel
>  execstack
>  firehol
>  gt5
>  guilt
>  hylafax+
>  krb5-libs
>  latex2rtf
>  lde
>  libguestfs
>  libsmi
>  linuxdoc-tools
>  lorax
>  netdump-server
>  nfs-utils
>  pcp
>  phpPgAdmin
>  pkgdiff
>  policycoreutils
>  quilt
>  ragel
>  rarian
>  R-core
>  rear
>  rf
>  rpm-build
>  rpmdevtools
>  screenie
>  seqan
>  testssl
>  translate-shell
>  tuned
>  tw
>  txt2man
>  unity-gtk-module-common
>  virt-p2v-maker
>  virt-v2v
>  vzctl-core
>  xfce4-dev-tools
>  ypserv
>  
>  -----------------------
>  
>  ​Best regards,
>  
>  David Kaspar [Dee'Kej]
>  *Associate Software Engineer*
>  *Brno, Czech Republic*
>  
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