[Pkg-giraffe-discuss] FW: no version checks for gsoap and libvmime in kopanocore

[Jan Engelhardt]

On Tuesday 2017-04-11 13:38, Carsten Schoenert wrote:
>Am 11.04.2017 um 13:17 schrieb Jan Engelhardt:
>>>> Wouldn't it be better to add some version checks into the configure.ac
>>>> file to prevent such build attempt what obviously needs to get failed?
>> 
>> As soon as the problem was identified, the gsoap packages provided by the
>> openSUSE distribution and Kopano delivery channel received a fix; as such,
>> there were instances of "2.8.35" where the problem did not occur.
>> 
>> Version checks do not always make sense exactly because of this. That's also
>> the reason why things like autoconf/cmake check for _behavior_ of programs, not
>> any particular version.
>
>I agree, normally in most cases it's enough to check for a valid
>version. So you mind it would be better here to check for the
>availability of the correct symbol or function within gsoap or a
>combination of booth?

There is no change in ABI, API, or symbol table, just the runtime
behavior of /usr/bin/soapcpp2. This is why we are testing for the
output from that utility (soapC.cpp). That so happens to be done at
the time of running soapcpp2 rather than earlier. I guess one *could*
write a small testcase for configure.ac, but it feels redundant to
spend an extra 30-50 LOC just to have "configure" fail instead of
"make".