Bug#651997: python-dolfin: unknown symbol: wrapper_dgesv_

[Conrad Sand]

On 23 December 2011 02:19, Kumar Appaiah <akumar at debian.org> wrote:
> After some discussion with upstream here is the summary:
>
> - Upstream will not raise the soname, since this, in their view, is
>  does not warrant one. Their opinion is that armadillo's ABI isn't
>  really for direct use by the end user, so a recompile should
>  suffice.
> - They recommend eliminating all versions of the old libraries and
>  rebuilding dolfin with the new ones.

To add to the above:

I can understand the severity of an ABI breakage in a stable version
such as Debian 6.  It should never occur.

However, the only official release is "stable", as far as I understand
how Debian works. There is no official release of "unstable" or
"testing". They are by definition (and their names) not guaranteed to
be stable, as they are by design in flux until an official release.

Building software on something named "unstable" and then using it on
"testing" (or vice versa) is hence by definition not guaranteed to
work.

Dolfin will be "broken" only while the shared library in both
"unstable" and "testing" is different.  This is only temporary.

As such, the version problem itself is only temporary.  Rather than
bumping the soname (which will have to be forever maintained by
Debian), a quick solution is to simply propagate Armadillo 2.4.2 into
both the "unstable" and "testing" streams. That way software such as
Dolfin will never again get linked with the old v2.2, and hence there
will be no version issues.

I do not plan on adding any more ABI changes without bumping the
soname.  I'm not pleased that such ABI changes had to be done in the
first place.