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Re: Distributions still suffering from s390 ABI change problems.


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.


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