Re: [PATCH 4/4] Add --disable-major-minor-libraries configure option

[Joseph Myers <joseph@codesourcery.com>]

On Wed, 9 Jun 2021, Florian Weimer via Libc-alpha wrote:

> * Joseph Myers:
> 
> > This needs a NEWS entry.
> 
> What about this?
> 
> * glibc can now be configured with the --disable-major-minor-libraries
>   option.  In this case, the various shared objects that are part of
>   glibc will be installed under their ABI sonames (such as libc.so.6)
>   rather than version-specific file names (such as libc-2.34.so).  As
>   before, by default, glibc installs them as version-specific file
>   names, with the ABI sonames added as symbolic links.  The
>   --disable-major-minor-libraries option enables safer downgrades with
>   package managers which delete removed files very late, after invoking
>   ldconfig.

That seems reasonable (if we have this option at all).

> Indepdently of the implementation of the patch, do you think this is
> something that needs to be configurable, or can we remove versioned file
> names altogether?

I don't know why we have the versioned file names, but my guess would be 
it was intended to help with downgrades after a non-package-manager 
installation directly into the root filesystem went wrong (someone could 
try to use sln to recover by linking back to the older-version files).

I don't think we should expect installation directly into the root 
filesystem by "make install" to work reliably anyway, let alone provide a 
downgrade mechanism, so I don't see the need to support versioned file 
names any more.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com