© 2004
Canonical Ltd.
•
Terms of use
•
Data privacy
•
Contact Launchpad Support
•
Blog
•
Careers
•
System status
•
35a32c5
(Get the code!)
>Can you be a bit more specific and verbose, what exactly "breaks"?
I have an application that has a dependency on libexpat.so.0. It runs fine on 6.06.
It runs fine on 7.10. It fails to run on 8.04 because libexpat.so.0 does not exist on 8.04.
>Why should "binary compatibility" be broken by removing a link, that should have been never added?
Removing that link removes an interface from the OS. Removing a public interface
from the OS breaks binary compatibility.
> To be honest: I miss the compelling reason to leave this link. wink has been fixed and no other packages were affected.
Actually that logic is reversed. You need a compelling reason to remove libexpat.so.0.
Plus you need some confidence that the number of applications that will break
is mitigated somehow.
You can't possibly know about all software that runs on Ubuntu, so saying
"no other packages were affected" is pretty presumptuous.
Look, I'm not saying you can never, ever break compatibility. But when you do there
needs to be a very good reason why, and some confidence that the impact on
customers and developers is minimal.