Re: [musl] musl -- FFS get your shit together, please

[Jeffrey Walton <noloader@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jul 17, 2023 at 11:21 AM Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jul 17, 2023 at 01:17:58AM -0500, Dave Blanchard wrote:
> > There's a lot to like about musl, but damn, there's some absolutely ridiculous aspects also:
> >
> > 1) How in the hell are you going to make a MAJOR change like
> > changing #ifdefs from defined(_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE) ||
> > defined(_GNU_SOURCE) to just defined(_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE) in a PATCH
> > level increment, from 1.2.3 to 1.2.4? What the hell is wrong with
> > you? You just broke my entire build! Yet another patch had to be
> > created on my end to UNDO this crazy change; the only alternative
> > was patching half the packages on my system to fix their now-broken
> > build! Do you know NOTHING about proper versioning???
>
> Our versioning system works like this: in x.y.z,
>
> - increment of x, likely to never happen, would indicate a completely
>   different ABI
>
> - increment of y indicates a change whereby programs compiled for the
>   new y, even without use of any new features added in new y, may not
>   run with an older y. canonical example: time64.
>
> - increment of z indicates a change whereby programs built for the new
>   z should still run on older z (modulo any bugs that might be present
>   in the older version) as long as they're not using new interfaces
>   introduced in the new z.
>
> All of these conditions are assuming the program used the public
> interfaces and did not poke at unspecified internals, etc.; if it did,
> all bets are off and any version change may be fully-breaking to the
> program.
>
> Note that all of these deal with ABI compatibility, not compile-time
> compatibility.

To play devil's advocate... If a symbol in Musl disappears, then
shouldn't that be considered an ABI break? And then, shouldn't it
require a major or 'x' bump?

It seems like Musl signed that contract when it first published a
symbol under _LARGEFILE64_SOURCE or _GNU_SOURCE. When the symbol
disappeared using one or the other define, then the contract was
broken.

Jeff