Comment 19 for bug 286906

(In reply to comment #12)
> I don't think it begs that question, but it does raise it.

Ok, "raises" not "begs". But what is the answer?

> It's not something
> we can do anything about -- we can't prevent people from shipping our code as
> part of their distribution, obviously, so unless we want to grant everyone in
> the world the right to allocate our time to their pet fixes by simply packaging
> up our work,

This is off the mark again, no one is proposing that we enslave ourselves that way.

The issue is what happens if we fix this bug (marking it FIXED) so Ubuntu can and does provide a stable .so as a system library. Sure, they could ship a .so anyway (some do already, IIRC).

But we have a choice: fix this bug, or WONTFIX it (or stall, pretty much the same thing).

> I think we're best to just ignore this situation entirely, TBH.

Do you mean we should fix this bug and ignore the added risk of bad outcomes in the stable .so damaging our rep? Or WONTFIX/stall?

If this bug doesn't matter, then it's INVALID. I think it does matter. The way it matters is that we increase the good rep effects of a useful and safe-enough system lib, and the bad rep effects of the opposite kind of outcome, based on our supporting ("Make it possible") the system library with stable version.

It would be cool to have done this already for the years when our ABI was very stable. Now that we are destabilizing it, I'm a bit concerned about (a) rate at which we thrash it forcing too many stable major numbers downstream; (b) risk inherent in our seeming to leave (or be a party to leaving) unmaintained stable libs downstream.

/be