[libvirt] [libvirt-glib] Debian, symbol versioning & ABI breakage

Hey, http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=673430 has recently been brought to my attention. The Debian gnome-boxes package was failing to startup because it had been compiled against an older libvirt-glib version than the one that was installed on the system. So far, we have broken the ABI for each libvirt-glib release, and done that by changing the version of all symbols in libvirt-g*.syms. This works well on Fedora where rpm adds requires like libvirt-gobject-1.0.so.0(LIBVIRT_GOBJECT_0.0.8)(64bit) when building the package, thus preventing using gnome-boxes with an older/newer libvirt-glib build than the one it was compiled against. However, debian doesn't seem to take into account symbol versioning at all in their package dependencies, and rely on the library soname changing to detect ABI breakage. In short, the way we've handled ABI breakage so far is unnice to Debian ;) In my opinion, we should be aiming to make libvirt-glib ABI stable soon, so this issue shouldn't happen again soon, but I'm mentioning it for future reference ;) Christophe