Hi all, With the recent upload of diagnostics I've again been bitten by dpkg-gensymbols [1]. As you might notice, the symbol is/was there, just the mangling scheme seems to have changed. For one, the next upload will be the third upload just to fix changed symbol names on alpha. One could argue that I should have built the package on an alpha system beforehand to avoid such brokenness. Well, I did. Most probably the g++ versions used on albeniz.d.o and goetz just don't match. Similarly, archive-rebuilds will show more or less spurious FTBFS (e.g., #562397 -- I'm building binary packages on amd64 myself).
I understand that symbol files could help to improve quality of our archives and, as diagnostics is about software quality as well, I'd tend to support this as well as possible. At the current stage, however, this seems hardly feasible with C++ libraries, unless I'm doing something wrong. Couldn't the following be implemented, maybe as some C++ mode of dpkg-gensymbols? - Instead of mangled symbol names, source packages should ship demangled symbol files. This way, package maintainers could truly inspect those lists of symbols and maintain them in a sane way (like manually adding symbols as the API evolves). The symbol names would remain independent of the architecture and sorted in some logical way (i.e., by C++ namespace and class names), unintended symbols as part of those lists would become obvious, etc. - Pending realizability using g++ or the like, these lists are converted to their architecture-specific variants consisting of mangled names by dpkg-gensymbols. - Subsequently, the mangled list and the contents of the library should be compared and (as done currently) deviances reported. It would be nice, of course, to demangle missing and/or additional symbol names. - The mangled list (generated from the list of the source package) should then be shipped in the binary package. I guess the facilities to mangle/demangle are there, I just don't know whether they are accessible from the command line. Best, Michael [1] https://buildd.debian.org/~luk/status/package.php?p=diagnostics
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