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Re: Distributions still suffering from s390 ABI change problems.
- From: David Miller <davem at davemloft dot net>
- To: carlos at redhat dot com
- Cc: roland at hack dot frob dot com, 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 13:24:44 -0700 (PDT)
- Subject: Re: Distributions still suffering from s390 ABI change problems.
- Authentication-results: sourceware.org; auth=none
- References: <53C40A5A dot 5050202 at redhat dot com> <20140714 dot 130755 dot 505683725595447159 dot davem at davemloft dot net> <53C43A5E dot 9020304 at redhat dot com>
From: "Carlos O'Donell" <carlos@redhat.com>
Date: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 16:15:26 -0400
> 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.
...
> 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.
We've told users we will maintain strict compatability against a given
SO version of glibc.
Now, s390 users cannot give eachother binaries neither backwards nor
forwards because of this change. It breaks in _both_ directions.
I have two theories as to why we didn't do any SO bumps in the past,
it's either 1) we found alternative ways to solve the problem (symbol
versioning, etc.) or 2) the maintainer in the past was strongly
against SO version bumps and nobody felt strong enough to fight him on
this point.