[ktp-common-internals] Symbols change without ABI bump ?

[Sandro Knauß]

Hey Aurélien,

> I’m not very used to packaging or updating libraries and there are a couple
> of symbol changes that I feel I need to ask for some review / help.
> Some changes caught by dpkg-gensymbols are symbols removals or replacements
> and they look like they are backwards incompatible and would deserve an ABI
> bump. But upstream didn’t do that. Am I missing something ?

No upstream is not in big parts not aware that ABI bumps make sense *sigh* you 
can try for KDE Telepathy, maybe you reach someone you understands, that 
bumping makes sense.

But there are solution for this in Debian ;D

DebianABIManager with this you can generate an ABIs like 5abiX. See e.g:
https://salsa.debian.org/qt-kde-team/kde/akonadi/commit/
c845fc7c4f3329dcd3ba2f75c6cdfa45abb51d9d

You need to insert some lines into CMakeLsits.txt and in d/control.

> I guess I cannot do a ABI bump on the Debian side only that would be
> incompatible with future upstream ABI bumps, so what should I do ?

the 5abiX is different from the properly next ABI 6 by upstream, so you should 
be fine. Btw. ABIs are just a string, that needs to be unique and most projects 
use just bare numbers for the ABI.

> Rebuild reverse dependencies and get going ?

not a good idea, as you break stuff for testing users in a way, that it hard to 
detect. Think about, if one reverse dependency enters testing before ktp-
common-internals reaches testing.

> Go ahead and impact the symbol changes without worrying because these
> changes don’t really matter ?

If you know, that no one used the missing symbols, you can go this way.

The other way you can use is to use virtual packages to define dependencies. At 
least for KDEPIM the ABIManager had some disadvantages, like we neded to 
everytime though NEW queue because of changes package names. In the end we now 
use virtual packages to define dependencies: 
https://salsa.debian.org/qt-kde-team/kde/akonadi/commit/
8381dd69a5a5d81d05bee1e398ced876a92bb903

I would recommend to go with the ABI Manager approach to get more knowledge 
about your reverse depdendencies etc. and ABI MAnager isn't sufficient, than we 
can look into the virtual package approach.

hefee 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://alioth-lists.debian.net/pipermail/pkg-kde-talk/attachments/20200128/203df5fd/attachment.sig>