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Date:      Sun, 26 Aug 2007 05:39:02 -0600
From:      John E Hein <jhein@timing.com>
To:        Yar Tikhiy <yar@comp.chem.msu.su>
Cc:        src-committers@freebsd.org, cvs-src@freebsd.org, alfred@freebsd.org, cvs-all@freebsd.org, Daniel Eischen <deischen@freebsd.org>, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: src/lib/libc/gen fts-compat.c fts-compat.h
Message-ID:  <18129.26198.138161.387852@gromit.timing.com>
In-Reply-To: <20070825053302.GG99474@comp.chem.msu.su>
References:  <20070824215515.GF16131@turion.vk2pj.dyndns.org> <20070824220244.GH87451@elvis.mu.org> <Pine.GSO.4.64.0708241819220.13181@sea.ntplx.net> <20070824.172212.74696955.imp@bsdimp.com> <Pine.GSO.4.64.0708242252520.15344@sea.ntplx.net> <20070825053302.GG99474@comp.chem.msu.su>

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Yar Tikhiy wrote at 09:33 +0400 on Aug 25, 2007:
 > On Fri, Aug 24, 2007 at 11:08:01PM -0400, Daniel Eischen wrote:
 > > 
 > > It should be easy to say FBSD_1.0 is RELEASE_7.0, FBBSD_1.1 is RELEASE_7.1,
 > > etc.  The versioned symbol namespace is mostly to aid the release
 > > engineers.  If you start to have FBSD_1.2, FBSD_1.3,  and FBSD_1.4
 > > are interim versions and FBSD_1.5 is release 7.1, that isn't good.
 > 
 > In addition, symbol versions are mere text labels with no special
 > meaning to ld(1), so we can format them to allow for version changes
 > between major releases.

By way of precedent, this reminds me of how __FreeBSD_version is used
for miscellaneous intra-release changes (changes that aren't
necessarily ABI changes, but perhaps disappearance or emergence of new
tools or tool changes).  For instance, this has been known to happen
when the pkg* tools change and the ports infrastructure is tweaked to
behave differently based on the fine-grained FreeBSD version (aka
OSVERSION).

Can the symbol versioning labels be standardized to make similar
accomodations for ABI changes in between releases?

Even in stable branches, now that I think about it.  I almost removed
that controversial thought from this email to avoid a flame war.  But
on the other hand, used conservatively, I could foresee a security fix
being made much easier if an ABI change was allowed.  This would be
quite rare, I'm sure.



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