On Thu, Apr 24, 2025 at 12:30:41PM +0200, Paul Gevers wrote: > Sorry taking so long to reply. I assumed because you filed a transition bug > that there was a regular SONAME bump involved.
It's likely my fault for not highlighting the unusual nature of dovecot when filing the bug. > I see that the dovecot-core ships libraries, but it looks like they > didn't bump SONAME. So how is this supposed to work in the dovecot > ecosystem? Isn't the package name supposed to change when SONAMEs > change (Debian policy) and isn't ABI breaking (which is implied by the > transition request and suggested by your Provides) not a reason to > bump SONAME? As this is a unconventional transition, I'm not > comfortable to judge. In the past, I don't believe we've actually treated dovecot version bumps as transitions, despite the impact that they have on reverse builddeps. I chose to do that for the 2.4 change because, at the time I opened the request, we were just starting the freeeze and I didn't want to risk complicating things with uncoordinated changes. Dovecot's relationship with its reverse builddeps is somewhat inverted from normal library providers. The reverse builddeps are plugins to the dovecot process, so they build shared libraries that are loaded by dovecot with dlopen(). They don't actually link against any dovecot-provided shared libraries at build time (in fact, the -dev package doesn't include any libraries). The binary interface is the dovecot process itself, plugins explicitly declare any dovecot plugin dependencies they may have, and symbol resolution happens at runtime. The ABI version and API version are considered the same thing, and are bumped with every upstream release. See https://doc.dovecot.org/2.4.1/developers/design/plugins.html > I'm unhappy with removing dovecot-antispam [1] so late for a transition > especially as I don't see a warning to its maintainers/users [2]. The > unconventional library handling (via the dovecot-abi-*.abiv* Provides from > dovecot-core IIUC) makes me want to defer to Release Team member colleagues > who handle much more transitions than I do. I did notify the maintainer privately, before realizing that they seem MIA, but didn't follow up with a bug report. I've now opened #1104033 for better visibility. https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1104033 noah
