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

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2013-12-26 at 18:51 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> 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).

Actually, Mamoru Tasaka handily identified the offending upstream commit
in the bug report, so I'm sending a build of libevdev with the function
removal reverted to Rawhide for now.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net