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Re: Distributions still suffering from s390 ABI change problems.
- From: "Carlos O'Donell" <carlos at redhat dot com>
- To: David Miller <davem at davemloft dot net>, Roland McGrath <roland at hack dot frob dot com>
- Cc: aurelien at aurel32 dot net, krebbel at linux dot vnet dot ibm dot com, siddhesh at redhat dot com, allan at archlinux dot org, libc-alpha at sourceware dot org
- Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 16:15:26 -0400
- Subject: Re: Distributions still suffering from s390 ABI change problems.
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
- References: <20140714072228 dot GF1239 at hall dot aurel32 dot net> <20140714 dot 002520 dot 985400136122770421 dot davem at davemloft dot net> <53C40A5A dot 5050202 at redhat dot com> <20140714 dot 130755 dot 505683725595447159 dot davem at davemloft dot net>
On 07/14/2014 04:07 PM, David Miller wrote:
> From: "Carlos O'Donell" <carlos@redhat.com>
> Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 12:50:34 -0400
>
>> IBM knew this was a serious mess, but for reasons of hardware enablement
>> the size had to be extended.
>
> This doesn't justify things, especially given what has ended up happening.
>
> Either you find a clean way to change the structure size (bump libc's
> SO version number), or you don't do it.
I've never seen a clean way to do a structure size increase, so in practice
that's always a SO version bump. I also don't know what kind of breakage
you have in the entire tooling when you do that. I expect some.
At the end of the day the machine maintainer has ultimate responsibility
for enabling their hardware for our users.
I guess as an FSF glibc steward my responsibility is to make sure the machine
maintainers do a good job. Did I fail at my responsibility by not barring
Andreas Krebbel from making this change without a SO version bump?
We've already had an entire release out with this change. There are binaries
with libc.so.6 already in the wild with the new ABI. So it seems like a mess
any way we swing it.
Should we have some kind of policy here? Should we start doing SO bumps when
we break things? We never have in the past, but I don't know why.
Cheers,
Carlos.