Marco,
Thank you for your feedback! Well deserved critique!
You are absolutely correct that this is an annoying problem that has to be addressed. Mark provided excellent explanation, but it does not help you to maintain the packages built on top of HDF5.
We started addressing the issue for 1.8.17, but couldn’t finish the work due to very limited bandwidth, complexity of the issue and disagreement on approach to the solution. I will not attempt to explain it in this email. The problem deserves a well written document that we don’t have at this point (contributes to the delay in finishing the work ;-).
I just wanted to let everyone know that we are very well aware of the problem; it has a high priority and we will get back to it after all features planned for 1.10.0 are finally out this Fall.
Elena
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Elena Pourmal The HDF Group http://hdfgroup.org
1800 So. Oak St., Suite 203, Champaign IL 61820
217.531.6112
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On Jun 21, 2016, at 9:17 AM, Marco Atzeri <marco.atzeri@gmail.com<mailto:marco.atzeri@gmail.com>> wrote:
On 21/06/2016 14:33, Miller, Mark C. wrote:
My understanding is that releases of HDF5 which differ in only the last
(patch) digit are not *always* ABI (Application Binary Interface)
compatible. They try to be but for practical reasons they are not always.
When they are not compatible, they should bump the ABI.
HDF5 it is already a champion as bumper in that field,
I am not aware of another library that bumped so many
time between minor version.
When the are not, compiling (e.g. using headers) with one version of the
library but linking (e.g. using .a,.so,.dyllib) to another can fail for
all sorts of hard-to-diagnose reasons.
The normal case on distribution is different:
I built the octave and netcdf package with hdf5-1.8.16;
later I package the hdf5-1.8.17 that is supposed to be ABI compatible,
and it produces a shared lib with the same name of hdf5-1.8.16 release.
Why I should rebuild octave and netcdf ?
It does not make sense.
Regards
Marco
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