Re: 21.11.1 patches review and test

From: Thomas Monjalon <thomas@monjalon.net>
To: Kevin Traynor <ktraynor@redhat.com>,
	Christian Ehrhardt <christian.ehrhardt@canonical.com>
Cc: Ori Kam <orika@nvidia.com>,
	stable@dpdk.org, dev@dpdk.org,
	Abhishek Marathe <Abhishek.Marathe@microsoft.com>,
	Ali Alnubani <alialnu@nvidia.com>,
	benjamin.walker@intel.com,
	David Christensen <drc@linux.vnet.ibm.com>,
	Hemant Agrawal <hemant.agrawal@nxp.com>,
	Ian Stokes <ian.stokes@intel.com>,
	Jerin Jacob <jerinj@marvell.com>,
	John McNamara <john.mcnamara@intel.com>,
	Ju-Hyoung Lee <juhlee@microsoft.com>,
	Luca Boccassi <bluca@debian.org>, Pei Zhang <pezhang@redhat.com>,
	qian.q.xu@intel.com, Raslan Darawsheh <rasland@nvidia.com>,
	yuan.peng@intel.com, zhaoyan.chen@intel.com
Subject: Re: 21.11.1 patches review and test
Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2022 09:17:14 +0200	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <2302806.yKrmzQ4Hd0@thomas> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAATJJ0KRjVqfO=dyUHWnnk6EGE=12Yv8+SofhQ375w2hxZp80A@mail.gmail.com>

14/04/2022 07:52, Christian Ehrhardt:
> On Wed, Apr 13, 2022 at 12:06 PM Kevin Traynor <ktraynor@redhat.com> wrote:
> > commit 026470bafaa02cba0d46ed7b7e835262399a009a
> > Author: Thomas Monjalon <thomas@monjalon.net>
> > Date:   Sun Mar 6 10:20:23 2022 +0100
> >
> >      build: hide local symbols in shared libraries
> >
> >      [ upstream commit b403498e14229ee903c8fff9baefcb72894062f3 ]
> >
> > In this case the symbol is not redesignated but removed, but it doesn't
> > look to have any use to a user, so I think it can be safe to remove.
> 
> I'm 100% with all others, thanks for having a look.
> On this one I can easily follow the argument of the fix for the newest release.
> But for stable we can never really know if there are users.
> In theory for anything that shipped in a Distribution someone might
> have coded and linked something against it - we would not know.
> The meant to be "stable" update will then break them the hard way.
> 
> In this case gladly the function wasn't anything that one would
> consider useful for use from outside, so I think it is ok.
> 
> But still I wanted to make the point that in general a symbol:
> 1. once released might be used and we can not never be sure if no one uses them
> 2. even being EXPERIMENTAL, touching them too much in stable updates
> means not-stable. Should we at least try to minimize the impact to
> stable releases?

Hiding symbols is mostly to enable future changes.
I'm not sure there is a need for such patch in a stable release.