Inter-WG coordination: Stable application runtimes

[Andrew Lutomirski]

On Tue, Dec 17, 2013 at 3:19 PM, Colin Walters <walters at verbum.org> wrote:
> Hi Andrew,
>
> On Tue, 2013-12-17 at 15:05 -0800, Andrew Lutomirski wrote:
>
>> There will be a similar problem in the docker images, unless you're
>> suggesting that everyone use Ubuntu-in-docker-on-Fedora/RHEL.
>
> True, but it becomes the responsibility of the container creator, not
> "Fedora".
>
> Anyways, I of course come from the perspective of glib maintainer, and
> we're already committed to "Compatibility level 1" starting from Red Hat
> Enterprise Linux 6, meaning there will be no ABI breaks for 3 major
> releases.  (See https://access.redhat.com/site/articles/119073 - this is
> transitive from the gtk2 stability ).
>
> I think it would also make sense to enforce these in Fedora (or really,
> enforce them upstream, which is where I do it).

IMO this is made considerably more complicated by the fact that
libtool's version-info doesn't really work on ELF systems -- there are
lots of libraries where, for example, .so.6 would be a perfectly fine
replacement for .so.7, but the system doesn't know that.

In principle, it would be possible for new versions to package
symlinks from the old .so.n files.

--Andy