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On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 2:35 AM, Paweł Hajdan, Jr. |
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<phajdan.jr@g.o> wrote: |
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> On 9/29/15 3:32 PM, Rich Freeman wrote: |
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>> The thing is that I think the libressl authors are shooting themselves |
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>> in the feet. When upstreams do this sort of thing they think they're |
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>> making the upgrade path easier by not changing their symbol names. In |
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>> reality, they're making the upgrade path harder by preventing |
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>> side-by-side adoption of the new solution. |
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> |
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> Yeah, it's not that obvious how to handle it best. |
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> |
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> Curious - how would the alternative look like? My reasoning is that if |
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> upstream changes symbols, that makes it easy for a distro to install it |
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> side-by-side. However, for anything to use such modified lib, they'd |
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> need to change all callers to use the alternative function names, |
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> wouldn't they? |
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Essentially, or somebody has to write a wrapper library. But, once |
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you start changing the APIs everybody has to start tweaking their code |
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anyway to use the modified function prototypes. Of course, they only |
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need to tweak the 10% of functions that changed, and not all of them. |
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Effectively it would mean that the new library would start out with |
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zero users, which is why nobody does it that way. However, I think |
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the end result is worse, unless you maintain strict compatibility. |
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It hasn't been as much of a problem with mariadb because they haven't |
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gone changing all their APIs/protocols/etc. |
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This is the sort of thing that Java was trying to stop with their |
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compatibility requirements, and what a lot of companies try to do with |
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trademark. The problem is that trademark doesn't really extend well |
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into things like symbol names and APIs. |
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Perhaps the in-between solution would be for forking upstreams to |
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preserve the same symbol names as long as the APIs are identical, and |
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change them when they are not. I don't really see that having any |
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more impact on downstream consumers than silently changing the APIs |
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and it would probably get rid of the symbol collision problem. |
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-- |
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Rich |
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