disruptive libffi upgrade

[Peter Robinson]

On Fri, Apr 13, 2012 at 1:59 AM, Anthony Green <green at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
>  I recently release libffi 3.0.11, and ABI changes are mandating a .so
>  number change.  Despite the ABI change, I suspect that simple rebuilds
>  are all that will be required for dependent packages.
>
>  The ABI changes are simply:
>
> 1. Some internal debugging functions that should never have been
> exported have been removed:
>
>         void ffi_stop_here(void)
>         void ffi_assert(char *expr, char *file, int line)
>         void ffi_type_test(ffi_type *a, char *file, int line)
>
> 2. A new function has been introduced to support
>   variadic functions (ffi_prep_cif_var).
>
>  Libtool's guidelines for .so versioning mandate that I move from
>  libffi.so.5.0.11 to libffi.so.6.0.0 (because functions have been
>  removed).
>
>  There are more than a handful of packages that depend on libffi, so
>  I'm looking for advice on when to make this change.  Also, is there a
>  convenient way to determine which packages in all of Fedora depend on
>  libffi?  I would like to notify the maintainers that rebuilds will be
>  required.  Or is there some other way to do this?

Around 51 packages according to "repoquery --whatrequires libffi.so.5"
but it's likely a little late in F-17 for something like that unless
it does something quite special in terms of performance or security. I
suggest this is something to push to F-18.

Peter