ABI changes still pending for glibc 2.32?

[Carlos O'Donell]

On 7/11/20 12:27 PM, Andreas K. Hüttel wrote:
>>
>>> Medium term a backport to the older release branches would be nice.
>>
>> I expect that few distributions want to change locales during a
>> release in this way.  If you want to pick up the change, I'd suggest a
>> local backport.
> 
> Well either it's a bug, then it needs to be fixed. Or 2.30 and 2.31 are 
> somehow ... different? I mean, this is the whole point why I made noise in the 
> first place. 

We *should* have fixed in 2.30, but we failed to do so.

The problem is now this:

* When do users expect such layout to change?

  - Do users expect point releases to change time formatting?

  - Do users expect point releases to change collation sorting?

  - ...

In Fedora we have actively avoided changing some of these things, even if
they were wrong, because people were already working around the bugs and
expected only to see fixes in a major upgrade e.g. dnf system-upgrade.
They otherwise generally expected things to be stable in the released
version.

This is entirely a choice that you need to make as the downstream
maintainer.

I think upstream glibc should be as conservative in the release branches
as the union of the downstream distros.

Thus in public glibc release branches we don't generally:

* Change the collation of existing strings in the release.

* Change existing locales in ways which are visible and change widths,
  or lengths of vaious strings.

Yes, it does mean 2.30 and 2.31 are special, but it also means that people
can rely on their workarounds to work for all installed 2.30 and 2.31.

-- 
Cheers,
Carlos.