[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#879886: libhts2: libhts2 needs to handle ABI changes

[Mattia Rizzolo]

On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 12:52:31AM -0400, Afif Elghraoui wrote:
> We've been doing this for every htslib suite release and can confirm
> upstream's explanation.

It seems to me the most "interesting" argument in #822701#26 is this:
    | What's described in that thread is undocumented internal private
    | htslib functions that should always have been static getting made
    | static

Well, it should have been made from the very start.  "getting made
static" is something that needs to be done during an ABI bump, otherwise
you break it.

Now, it might not be very interesting now, because indeed most probably
nothing used those symbols indeed, but nonetheless, that's how you are
supposed to handle what de-facto is a public interface.
You can never know that somebody's private code was using that
interface, and suddenly making a function static would break it at
runtime.

> Other packages do not get broken. Upstream has
> made a soname bump as appropriate for the 1.4 release if I remember
> correctly. That's all I can say about this; I don't actually work on the
> htslib packaging myself.

What would have been good to prevent the current breakage that has been
brought to my attention (samtools), what happened is that the newest
version of samtools picked up a symbol that was not in the original
libhts2.  Remember that adding symbols is not an ABI break.  Though,
that requires using a versioned dependency, which in a perfect world
would be provided (forced?) by a proper htslib packaging.

-- 
regards,
                        Mattia Rizzolo

GPG Key: 66AE 2B4A FCCF 3F52 DA18  4D18 4B04 3FCD B944 4540      .''`.
more about me:  https://mapreri.org                             : :'  :
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