Re: LSB inclusion of OpenLDAP

["Kurt D. Zeilenga" <Kurt@OpenLDAP.org>]

At 12:24 PM 10/25/2005, Howard Chu wrote:
>There are some issues. Read through this thread http://www.openldap.org/lists/openldap-devel/200510/msg00117.html for background.

I note that as the libraries includes deprecated interfaces
regardless of how LDAP_DEPRECATED is defined.  LDAP_DEPRECATED
impacts which interfaces are exposed in the API, not the ABI.

Pradosh Adoni wrote:
> Any comments ? 

I do note that its kind of odd to talk here in terms of ABIs
as the project releases OpenLDAP Software in source form
only.  It should be obvious that two independent builds
of the same release of OpenLDAP Software can easily have
incompatible ABIs, though their APIs should be compatible.
For instance, a libraries built with -m64 v. -m32 have
different ABIs.  Likewise for numerous other build
environment differences.

It should be clear that we do change APIs on occasion: adding,
deleting, or modifying interfaces.  This has an obvious
impact on ABIs.  Our general rule is to avoid non-backwards
compatible changes with a release series, such as 2.3.X.
Additions are normally allowed until the series is feature
frozen.  Deletions and modifications are generally deferred
to the next release series.

I note that we do managing library versioning for each
minor release series independently of other series.  That
is, we change the soname with each minor release as we
expect programs compiled for one minor release to be
recompiled before using a different minor release.

Personally, I think it would unwise to include ABIs into
a standard that are not well documented and for which
are known to have significant design problems, such as
bad error handling.  But, hey, bad error handling in
POSIX and other interface standards is par for the course.

I also think it premature to standardize an ABI before
dependent ABIs are standardized.  That is, you should
consider standardizing SASL, TLS, and the like, as well
as their dependencies, first.

Kurt