Mattia Rizzolo wrote: > On Fri, May 04, 2018 at 04:06:05PM +0300, Yavor Doganov wrote: > > Andreas Tille wrote: > > > What's the correct way to fix the symbols file to work with both > > > versions of gcc? > > > > Don't use symbols files for C++ libraries? > > Please do not advocate nor recommend such pointless stands.
Symbols files are not mandatory; it's up to the maintainer whether to use them or not. If the maintainer's judgment is that the burden outweighs the benefit, then so be it -- there is nothing wrong in that. What makes me feel uneasy is that the standard way of maintaining symbols files involves abusing the Debian infrastructure. It was unthinkable 10-15 years ago to upload a package knowing in advance that it would definitely FTBFS at least on certain architectures. That's common practice nowadays and some of the slow arches are suffering from it. > Yes, many C++ libraries do a very horrible job at ABI maintenance > that for them maintaining a symbols file is impossible. They are probably hard to maintain as proper public shared libraries, with symbols files or not. > No, it's not impossible to maintain a symbols file for a C++ > library. I didn't say it is impossible. > Guess what, C++ is more complex than C. Undoubtedly.