Re: 5.1 vs. 6.0_BETA

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 04:21:06PM +0100, Manuel Bouyer wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 25, 2012 at 01:58:02PM +0000, Matthias Scheler wrote:
> > > After updating the system from 5.1 to 6.0_BETA I've found that a lot of
> > > applications built for 5.1 stop working due to lack of __cerror in libc.
> > > 
> > > mediatomb, for example, says
> > > 
> > >     /usr/lib/librt.so.0: Undefined symbol "__cerror" (symnum = 12)
> > > 
> > > This change probably comes from here
> > > 
> > >     http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-userlevel/2010/12/10/msg004230.html
> > > 
> > > Is this breakage expected?
> > 
> > It doesn't matter IMHO whether it is expected or not. It is simply
> > not acceptable. Backwards compatibility has always been and still
> > is an important goal for NetBSD.
> 
> Sure. I think this has to be fixed before 6.0_BETA can be officially
> announced.
> Could bumping the major number of these libraries be an alternative
> to exporting __cerror again ? What are the pros and cons of each
> fix ?

We've done quite some work to avoid bumping the libc major so far, so I
don't think we should do it now. Let's look at it as project for
netbsd-7. The patch gives all the benefits of the original behavior
(local jumps / calls), but restores the compat behavior for old
dependent libraries.

Joerg