Unannounced ABI change without soname bump in libevdev-0.6 in Rawhide (and F19 and F20...) breaks GNOME, probably other consumers

[Adam Williamson]

Time for another PSA...

It appears libevdev 0.6 breaks the library's ABI without bumping the
soname (and without an announcement here or anywhere else I can find,
but an ABI change without an soname bump is just flat out wrong whether
announced or not). 0.6 was sent to Rawhide, F19 and F20 simultaneously.

The ABI change breaks GNOME in F20 and Rawhide (because clutter was
using the calls that disappeared in the 0.6 build):

undefined symbol: LIBEVDEV_READ_NORMAL  (/lib/libclutter-1.0.so.0)
undefined symbol: LIBEVDEV_READ_SYNC    (/lib/libclutter-1.0.so.0)

Dec 26 02:02:34 pressanykey gnome-session[1320]: gnome-shell: symbol
lookup error: /lib64/libclutter-1.0.so.0: undefined symbol:
LIBEVDEV_READ_NORMAL

Reported as https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1046426 .

Rebuilding clutter is not trivial at present, and in fact builds of
clutter appear to fail on this same libevdev issue. So right now, GNOME
in Rawhide is broken if you install libevdev 0.6, and this monkey
doesn't feel comfortable trying to fix it (I don't want to start
randomly whacking things in clutter's code to try and make it build
against the new libevdev). I recommend not installing this build, and
downgrading to 0.5 if you currently have 0.6 installed. If anyone from
the desktop team is able to get together with Peter and resolve this
SNAFU for Rawhide ASAP, that'd be great, though I realize we're all
supposed to be on vacation.

Happily, the update for F20 has already been negative-karma'ed out of
existence, and the F19 update is well on its way there. Take note, those
who say the update karma system is useless: without it, we would likely
have broken the world's F20 systems shortly after release...(F19's
clutter doesn't seem to use libevdev so GNOME on F19 doesn't break,
apparently, but the libevdev update still shouldn't go out).

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=486593 (Rawhide)
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2013-23934/libevdev-0.6-1.fc20 (F20)
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2013-23961/libevdev-0.6-1.fc19 (F19)
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net