Bug#438817: ABI breakage between notrace and -ptrace/-develop variants

[Faidon Liambotis]

Source: openh323
Version: 1.18.0.dfsg-2
Severity: grave

openh323 now builds three different variants of the library: the plain,
the -ptrace one and the -develop one.

The plain version is now compiled with NOTRACE which unfortunately
changes the ABI. This is a bug by itself, since there was no SONAME bump
(and IMHO we shouldn't break the SONAME) and programs linked against the
old version of libopenh323-dev wouldn't necessarily work with the new
libopenh323-1.18.0 package

Besides that, openh323u.mak sets NOTRACE to nothing which results in
passing -DPTRACING to all source files of the program linking against
libopenh323.

Programs expect that when PTRACING is defined, the library is supporting
PTRACE and may use it to guard such function calls.

Until upstream provides a better way that does not break the ABI (e.g.
by providing stub functions), the -ptrace binary should be reinstated as
the
default one.
In case the performance benefits are big enough and upstream does not
help, we could create another package called -notrace/-server/-something
and
ship different shlibs and a modified openh323u.mak makefile in a
separate -dev
package.

I've discussed this briefly with Kilian on IRC but I'm reporting it
anyway to
the BTS with the appropriate severity so that the package won't migrate to
testing.

Regards,
Faidon