[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#897794: How to fix symbols files to work with gcc-7 and gcc-8 (Was: Bug#897794: libquazip: ftbfs with GCC-8)

[Yavor Doganov]

Mattia Rizzolo wrote:
> On Fri, May 04, 2018 at 04:06:05PM +0300, Yavor Doganov wrote:
> > Andreas Tille wrote:
> > > What's the correct way to fix the symbols file to work with both
> > > versions of gcc?
> > 
> > Don't use symbols files for C++ libraries?
> 
> Please do not advocate nor recommend such pointless stands.

Symbols files are not mandatory; it's up to the maintainer whether to
use them or not.  If the maintainer's judgment is that the burden
outweighs the benefit, then so be it -- there is nothing wrong in
that.

What makes me feel uneasy is that the standard way of maintaining
symbols files involves abusing the Debian infrastructure.  It was
unthinkable 10-15 years ago to upload a package knowing in advance
that it would definitely FTBFS at least on certain architectures.
That's common practice nowadays and some of the slow arches are
suffering from it.

> Yes, many C++ libraries do a very horrible job at ABI maintenance
> that for them maintaining a symbols file is impossible.

They are probably hard to maintain as proper public shared libraries,
with symbols files or not.

> No, it's not impossible to maintain a symbols file for a C++
> library.

I didn't say it is impossible.

> Guess what, C++ is more complex than C.

Undoubtedly.