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Re: libstdc++ soname and versioning
On Wed, 25 May 2005, Theodore Papadopoulo wrote:
| On that topic, my point was more to say "give some warranty/promise".
There is no point in making a promise when one does not have enough
data to keep it. That does not mean, we don't want; just that it is
hard work. And we have been carefully trying to make things as simple
as possible, at the expense of not fixing known bugs and not implementing
known improvements.
| I know that all of you are working carefully to avoid ABI changes as
| much as possible, but as far as I know there is no statement like "The C
| ++ library will be kept stable till release X.Y". Pick the X and Y you
| are confortable with, and of course, if there is a huge problem then the
| promise will be broken. As far as I remember, this happened at least
| once with core C++ ABI with gcc-3.1,
And I also distinctly remember the psychodrama that followed when
we discovered bugs we needed to fix, leading to premature gcc-3.2.x.
| but overall after a very few wrong promises,
"very few" is an euphemism when you investigate the impact ihey had.
What value woul dthe promise will have if they are wrong.
That is not saying that it is not desirable to have a stable ABI, you
can grant people working on listdc++ that they do know its value.
However, I think extreme care should be exercised when people are
pushing hard for hard statements and promises about ABI stability.
That should not be underestimated or handwaved.
-- Gaby