But what about ABI breakage? (was Re: freetype 2.1.10 and Embolden)

On Fri, Nov 11, 2005 at 05:34:16PM -0600, atie wrote:
> First of all, thanks for bring freetype 2.1.10 into Dapper repo.

While I want freetype 2.1.10 as much as any other CJK people, I am sad
to see freetype 2.1.10-1 slipping into dapper without any special
attention.

Freetype 2.1.10 has huge API/ABI breakage compared with 2.1.7 (the
version in hoary, breezy and Debian sarge).  Some functions are dropped,
some changed their name, and a few new functions get added.

Despite all these, Debian 2.1.10-1 package kept the same SONAME and the
same shlib version.  The result includes, but is not limited to:
  - Firefox with printing enabled FTBFS (Debian bug 314243, [1])
  - Many GNUstep apps fail to start (Debian bug 314385 [2] and merged
    ones)
  - Packages built with against new libfreetype6 in dapper will fail to
    start on systems with old libfreetype.so.6 from 2.1.7

Debian bug 316031 [3] submitted by me has some more details about the
API/ABI change.  The Debian maintainer Will Newton also provided a
dynamic symbol comparison between 2.1.7 and 2.1.10.

I wonder what does the developers think about this issue?  Freetype
upstream says they are going to bump the SONAME to 7 in the coming 2.2.0
release, but it's not likely to happen soon.  As more and more packages
get built against libfreetype6 2.1.10-1, this problem will become larger
and larger.  I really hope it can get sorted out at this early stage of
develop cycle.

1. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=314243
2. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=314385
3. http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=316031

Thanks,
Ming
2005.11.12