Re: [Xen-devel] Re: [Xen-changelog] [xen-unstable] tools: Rationalise library soname versions.

[Ian Jackson <Ian.Jackson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Daniel P. Berrange writes ("Re: [Xen-devel] Re: [Xen-changelog] [xen-unstable] 
tools: Rationalise library soname versions."):
> IMHO, the entire rationale of setting all the sonames in one place is just
> plain wrong. Libraries evolve independantly and thus their sonames change
> independantly. Tieing sonames to the software release version number does
> not reflect the reality of their ABI evolution. sonames should only be
> changed when an existing API changes in a non-backwards compatible manner
> so its perfectly normal for an soname to stay the same across multiple
> releases if nothing changes, or merely new APIs are added without changing
> existing APIs.

In principle I agree with you.  However, in practice the project has
not been able to maintain the discipline needed to bump a soname when
the ABI changes.  Until this change, all of the libraries in
xen-unstable were claiming ABI-compatibility with 3.0 which was
definitely not correct.  Bumping the version numbers at release time
is at least something we can probably manage to do reliably.

This is perhaps slightly inconvenient but since the dom0 toolstack and
hypervisor generally don't maintain good binary compatibility across
releases anyway I don't think there's that much lost.  Do you
disagree ?

Ian.

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