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Re: [patch] remove atoff

On 08/26/2011 10:34 AM, Ralf Corsepius wrote:
On 08/26/2011 06:04 PM, Eric Blake wrote:

You can remove the declarations from headers, so that new apps won't use
it, but you may NOT remove the function itself, without breaking shared
library clients of newlib like cygwin.


It's impossible for Cygwin to remove very unlikely used symbols from its
dll?

It's impossible to remove dll entry points without breaking backwards compatibility to older apps that are depending on those entry points when you keep the old app but upgrade the dll.

Welcome to the life of shared libraries. Backwards compatibility matters. Deal with it.


Sounds like a serious defect and serious limitation of Cygwin to me.

Which is why we have since learned to not add new dll entry points to cygwin without good justification. We're stuck with the garbage until we get to a point where we are okay abandoning backward compatibility (which would necessarily require renaming things to cygwin 1.9 or even 2.1), but we can at least avoid adding new garbage.

--
Eric Blake   eblake@redhat.com    +1-801-349-2682
Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

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