Fedora Core 4

[Mike Hearn]

On Sat, 15 Jan 2005 18:29:08 -0200, Pedro Lamarão wrote:
> I believe the point of view of the glibc maintainers is as put by Ulrich 
> Drepper in his paper "Good practices in library design, implementation, 
> and maintenance", chapter three:
 
I think they are unrelated issues - bugfixes are important, but symbol
versioning as implemented in the GNU toolchain is flawed because it
ignores the possibility of people compiling old sources on new systems
(something that happens all the time ...). So regardless of peoples views
on bugfixing, I think overloading symbols with multiple versions is a bad
idea (or rather, the linker always selecting the latest version is a bad
idea).

And actually I'd disagree with Ulrichs view. Bug-free software isn't an
end itself, it's a means to an end. Sometimes the cost:benefit analysis of
fixing a bug just doesn't add up, and in that case it makes more sense to
simply document the buggy behaviour than fix it. This is especially true
in 99% of libraries which unlike glibc do not have to match a pre-written
specification (effectively, the librariy *is* the specification).

thanks -mike