Symbol versioning (Was: [Bug general/24000] couple of testsuite fails with uclibc library)

[Ulf Hermann]

> The problem is that without it every elfutils release would (possibly)
> break the ABI between the shared libraries and programs using them.
> And we don't have/use a different mechanism to indicate symbols/ABI
> changed. How do you prevent things breaking when upgrading the
> elfutils libraries?

I ship the version of elfutils the application links against with the 
application. That is common practice on windows (and also on e.g. 
macOS). The concept of package management only exist on some platforms 
and only in this context symbol versioning makes sense. Even on linux, 
with things like flatpak, binary compatibility between different 
versions of a library becomes less important.

best,
Ulf