[dpdk-dev] [RFC] meter: fix ABI break due to experimental tag removal

Neil Horman nhorman at tuxdriver.com
Wed Feb 5 12:32:45 CET 2020


On Wed, Feb 05, 2020 at 11:04:29AM +0100, Luca Boccassi wrote:
> On Tue, 2020-02-04 at 07:02 -0500, Neil Horman wrote:
> > > But if we can do the versioning in the master, LTS can backport it
> > > and can have
> > > mature version of that API in LTS without breaking the existing
> > > users.
> > > 
> > 
> > But why bother?  The only thing you've changed is the version
> > tagging.  Its ok
> > to leave that alone in LTS, you just cant change it.
> > 
> > Thats part of the burden of an LTS release, it will have some drift
> > from the
> > upstream head, because you have to keep things stable.  So you
> > stabilize the
> > upstream ABI version for this API and just never backport it to the
> > current LTS
> > release.
> 
> Hi,
> 
> A customer (OVS) explicitly and specifically requested backporting the
> symbol change to 19.11, as they don't want to enable experimental APIs
> in their releases. I replied that it would only be acceptable with
> aliasing to keep compatibility, and Ferruh very kindly did the work to
> implement that.
> 
but, thats part of the agreement, no?  You can't always have new features and
stability at the same time.

I get that this is an odd corner case, because strictly speaking you could waive
the ABI change that libabigail is reporting, and most application users (like
OVS) could get away with it, because their application does all the right things
to make it ok, but I don't think you can make a decsion like this for all users
based on the request of a single user.

It seems like the right thing is for OVS to augment their build time
configuration to allow developers to select the ability to use experimental apis
at compile time, and then the decision is placed in the hands of end users.

Neil
> -- 
> Kind regards,
> Luca Boccassi
> 


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