Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 823992
Packages built against Fedora 17 glib do not have correct dependencies
Last modified: 2016-12-20 07:13:37 EST
I recently tried to update my Fedora 16 with just one or two new packages from Fedora 17, because some important bug fixes hadn't been backported. These packages require glib, and use new symbols which were only added in glib 2.31. But their dependencies are not correct. They *should* require libglib-2.0.so.0(GLIB_2.31)(64bit) but instead they only require libglib-2.0.so.0(64bit) without the version. This means that the new packages happily install alongside the old version of glib, and then fail at runtime because of their unmet dependencies. This is because glib itself is built without versioned symbols. If that were fixed, the packages which link against it would pick up *correct* dependencies.
glib doesn't use symbol versions, and it doesn't want to either.
Hm, I hadn't thought to look for previous discussion; it seems like such an obviously correct thing to do to fix a real problem, that I'm surprised anyone would not want to do it; I assumed it had just never been considered or a patch had never been provided. Looking now at some of the discussion, the 'no' camp doesn't seem to be particularly well-informed... - libxml2 seems to be used as an example of why symbol versioning is bad, because AFAICT it did something insanely broken (using symbol versions and then taking them *out* in release versions, or something like that?). That is not what I mean when I refer to symbol versioning. That is just complete crack; do not use that as an example of anything. - I see complaints that it doesn't allow you to version structures and other things, which is both incorrect and not necesarily relevant. Firstly, it *does* let you version structures. The canonical example of symbol versioning is its use in glibc to handle changes to 'struct stat'. And secondly, it doesn't have to solve every problem in the world — complaining that it won't cure AIDS is pointless. It solves the problem it's intended to solve, quite well. - I see complaints that it doesn't work on every platform. Which is also fine. It doesn't *hurt* any of the few platforms that don't support it. It *does* work on any platform which uses the GNU linker (or gold), and Solaris. - I see complaints that it can't cope with incompatibilities for which we really *do* need to be changing the soname of the library rather than attempting to claim backward compatibility anyway (like changing non-opaque structures that are embedded in users' own variables such as GtkWidget). Unless I'm misreading that, and in fact it was a complaint that it would be impractical to provide full backward compatibility in that case, by using symbol versions to provide "old" versions of every function that touches something like GtkWidget — which of course isn't something I'd suggest attempting anyway. Did I miss anything?
This message is a reminder that Fedora 17 is nearing its end of life. Approximately 4 (four) weeks from now Fedora will stop maintaining and issuing updates for Fedora 17. It is Fedora's policy to close all bug reports from releases that are no longer maintained. At that time this bug will be closed as WONTFIX if it remains open with a Fedora 'version' of '17'. Package Maintainer: If you wish for this bug to remain open because you plan to fix it in a currently maintained version, simply change the 'version' to a later Fedora version prior to Fedora 17's end of life. Bug Reporter: Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry that we may not be able to fix it before Fedora 17 is end of life. If you would still like to see this bug fixed and are able to reproduce it against a later version of Fedora, you are encouraged change the 'version' to a later Fedora version prior to Fedora 17's end of life. Although we aim to fix as many bugs as possible during every release's lifetime, sometimes those efforts are overtaken by events. Often a more recent Fedora release includes newer upstream software that fixes bugs or makes them obsolete.
Fedora 17 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2013-07-30. Fedora 17 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.
Still not fixed. Still no good reason not to fix it other then "libxml did something insane and now we think symbol versioning has cooties"
It is not going to get fixed. I don't think there's a point in keeping this bug around.
I put in the effort to find existing discussions and attempt to make sense of them, and I would appreciate a substantive response to comment 2 rather than a simple "no, we *want* this to be broken".
This bug appears to have been reported against 'rawhide' during the Fedora 23 development cycle. Changing version to '23'. (As we did not run this process for some time, it could affect also pre-Fedora 23 development cycle bugs. We are very sorry. It will help us with cleanup during Fedora 23 End Of Life. Thank you.) More information and reason for this action is here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/BugZappers/HouseKeeping/Fedora23
This message is a reminder that Fedora 23 is nearing its end of life. Approximately 4 (four) weeks from now Fedora will stop maintaining and issuing updates for Fedora 23. It is Fedora's policy to close all bug reports from releases that are no longer maintained. At that time this bug will be closed as EOL if it remains open with a Fedora 'version' of '23'. Package Maintainer: If you wish for this bug to remain open because you plan to fix it in a currently maintained version, simply change the 'version' to a later Fedora version. Thank you for reporting this issue and we are sorry that we were not able to fix it before Fedora 23 is end of life. If you would still like to see this bug fixed and are able to reproduce it against a later version of Fedora, you are encouraged change the 'version' to a later Fedora version prior this bug is closed as described in the policy above. Although we aim to fix as many bugs as possible during every release's lifetime, sometimes those efforts are overtaken by events. Often a more recent Fedora release includes newer upstream software that fixes bugs or makes them obsolete.
Fedora 23 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2016-12-20. Fedora 23 is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of Fedora please feel free to reopen this bug against that version. If you are unable to reopen this bug, please file a new report against the current release. If you experience problems, please add a comment to this bug. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed.