From: Miguel de Icaza (miguel@gnu.org)
Date: Tue Jun 22 1999 - 09:07:43 EDT
> Released Gnumeric an GnoRPM are linked against libxml.so.0 which
> have the old behaviour. The new semantic is present only in libxml.so.1
> wich won't be used unless you recompile the application, right ?
Yes.
Now, the big problem we are facing here is that package managers like
RPM are not designed to have you keep multiple versions of the same
library around. You can not have libxml-0.1 and libxml-0.2 installed
on the system unless you resort to some spec hacking and magic (like
gtk10, gtk rpms).
By making this sort of incompatible changes we are going back to the
very bad situation we had in october last year, where a change in one
library required upgraded everything.
I want to avoid going that way again. The chagne is very small
Daniel, and it would give lots of benefit from a deployment of GNOME
point of view.
We have to be serious about being binary compatibility for attracting
developers to GNOME. If we go back to the we-change-the-api-weekly
mode we are going to loose again.
> I really don't want people to wonder whether their code is reentrant or not
> it has to be, the error was in releasing an initial version which was not.
> I plead guilty for this one, but would rather avoid having to maintain
> both APIs forever, the major revision change in the libxml is the opportunity
> to change the API in a sane way IMHO,
The cost we will end up paying for this is high Daniel.
The KDE team is currently in the position we were on October: too many
dependencies on specific library versions which has even stopped them
from releasing KOffice. Please, do not make GNOME go in this
direction just because you dont want to maintain these four lines of
code:
> CHAR *xmlEncodeEntities_r (xmlDocPtr doc, const CHAR *input)
> {
> return g_strdup (xmlEncodeEntities (doc, input));
> }
Miguel.
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