Fwd: Compat Libraries (was Re: libcurl.so.2) [mpeters at mac.com]

[Sean]

On Tue, December 7, 2004 10:00 pm, Sean Middleditch said:

> [...]
> If the packages had just used a more intelligent naming scheme, this
> problem wouldn't exist, ever.  Name the packages libfoo1, libfoo2, etc.
> Get rid of the compat-foo stuff.  If you upgrade, libfoo1 stays around,
> libfoo2 is installed, no problems.  Ten years down the road (assuming
> the glibc/gcc gods don't decide to screw users over again and break tons
> of ABI) you can still install your apps that relies on libfoo1.  You may
> not have that package, but you can grab it online and install it, and it
> just works.  No worries that you need an old version of compat-foo that
> need manual rpm -i invocation to install alongside the current compat-
> foo, no worries about having a 100MB compat-foo, etc.
> [...]

Ten years down the road all you need to do is download the recompiled
version of your app against the latest version of the library.   With a
proper repository infrastructure most of this can be more or less
transparent to the users.  Thus reducing the bloat of the older libraries.
 Pretty straight forward for packagers to automate the recompilation of
applications for different targets too.

After recompiling, any ABI changes will be accounted for as well as
security and performance improvements.   There's seems to be little reason
to need old libraries on an open source platform.  One version of compat-*
libs seems like a reasonable tradeoff to facilitate a transition to the
next rev.
Stable platforms with long life cycles like RHEL also reduce the issue.  
Fedora seems to be doing the right thing considering what its trying to
accomplish and provide for the people that choose it as a distro.

Sean