* Magnus Holmgren <holmg...@debian.org> [140424 21:24]:
> tisdagen den 22 april 2014 22.12.24 skrev Steve M. Robbins:
> > I think I understand the rationale for using the super-fine-grained symbol
> > versioning. If someone from the debian-science-maintainers team would like
> > to maintain this file, please go ahead and commit it to the repository.
> > Unfortunately, I don't have the time to audit each release; so if left to
> > me, I will use the easy and conservative "dh_makeshlibs -V" solution.
>
> Once the symbols file is in place, maintaining it shouldn't require very much
> effort. As I explained, dpkg-gensymbols, which is run by dh_makeshlibs, tells
> you about any symbol changes when you build the package. You merely have to
> apply the generated diff to the symbols file and adjust the minium required
> version appropriately, making the procedure more automated compared to
> manually checking when the dependencies have to change. Running simply
> "dh_makeshlibs -V" should be avoided as will result in unnecessarily tight
> dependencies and therefore may delay testing transitioning.
It's not as simple as that. dpkg-gensymbols has no way to know when the
contents of a symbol change in a way that you need to increase the
minimum version needed for a specific symbol, it only checks when it is
added.
To maintain a symbol file, you need to check if any symbol got any new
or changed functionality which means that someone using the new version
might break if using the old version.
Just applying the patches from dpkg-gensymbols is not maintaining a
symbols file. Improperly maintaining a symbols file means you get
dependencies that are not strict enough so people installing the package
might end up with non-working packages without the tools installing
new enough packages for them or telling them they miss those packages.
If all you plan to do is to apply the patches from dpkg-gensymbols then
please drop the symbols file and use dh_makeshlibs -V. Needlessly strict
dependencies are better then needlessly broken packages.
Bernhard R. Link
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