Comments on: Flash 10 uses native libcurl

By: spot

spot — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 12:31:49 +0000

First off, as the individual who made the change, let me apologize for any slight towards you or curl that you may feel, it was certainly not my intent.

When we discovered that Flash 10 wouldn’t work on any Fedora release, we asked Adobe about rebuilding against modern curl, but the response that we got was a no. The distribution that they build their Flash bits against only had libcurl.so.3, and they weren’t about to do multiple builds. Besides, didn’t we know that there was no ABI break? Look at Debian/Ubuntu!

This is where we should have asked you (curl upstream), but instead, we looked at Debian, and sure enough:

http://packages.debian.org/sid/i386/libcurl3/filelist

Since we couldn’t make a symlink to solve the problem (we needed an actual library file to have rpm autodetect it as a library provide), I implemented the hack that you’ve seen.

This morning, I’ve checked some of the other popular Linux distros:

Ubuntu (same as Debian):
http://packages.ubuntu.com/hardy/i386/libcurl3/filelist

Mandriva 2008.1:
[spot@localhost ~]$ rpm -qlp libcurl4-7.18.0-1mdv2008.1.i586.rpm
/usr/lib/libcurl.so.4
/usr/lib/libcurl.so.4.0.1

Gentoo:
http://sources.gentoo.org/viewcvs.py/gentoo-x86/net-misc/curl/curl-7.18.2.ebuild?rev=1.6&view=markup
(I’m admittedly not an expert at translating ebuilds, but it looks like they’re not doing anything to generate a libcurl.so.3)

Slackware:
http://packages.slackware.it/package.php?q=current/curl-7.16.2-i486-1
[spot@localhost ~]$ tar tvfz curl-7.16.2-i486-1.tgz |grep libcurl.so
-rwxr-xr-x root/root 234960 2007-05-06 23:11 usr/lib/libcurl.so.4.0.0

OpenSUSE:
They actually provide libcurl3 and libcurl4 packages in 11.0:
http://packages.opensuse-community.org/listcontents.jsp?checksum=0af9928af0e9e36cf1b1af441124688b123651ed&distro=openSUSE_110
http://packages.opensuse-community.org/packageinfo.jsp?checksum=e8b7da4021d1868ba153c426cac33c893af3fd83&distro=openSUSE_110

Fedora _could_ do that too, but we’ve got concerns about carrying compatibility versions of older libraries, because they tend to not get bugfixes or security fixes from upstream, but if you are willing to do so, we might consider it.

So, this puts us in a tough place. I believe you when you say that the ABI is different between .3 and .4, but Adobe doesn’t seem willing to budge on the matter, because it “works on Ubuntu”. I’m more than willing to listen to any advice you are willing to give us here.

Thanks,

Tom Callaway

By: daniel

daniel — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:53:53 +0000

Right, I noticed your recently added comment in that bugzilla entry I referred to above. Thanks for the links!

By: till

till — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:16:01 +0000

Please note that it is best practices for Fedora maintainers to upstream patches and cooperate with upstream:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/PatchUpstreamStatus
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PackageMaintainers/WhyUpstream
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Objectives

By: daniel

daniel — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:40:07 +0000

Well, you could also argue that these guys could ask the libcurl developers about things, as then they would get the facts from the people who makes the lib. I don’t think it is my job to chase around crazy linux distro people and tell them about how I view their packaging choices. They’re free to act however they want.

Also, I’ll admit that Fedora’s choices in the past also gives me very little incentive to help them: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=427966

By: pghmcfc

pghmcfc — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:22:33 +0000

Actually the Fedora decision was not reverted:

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2008-August/msg00639.html

I think a word from upstream (perhaps on fedora-devel-list or a bugzilla ticket) might persuade them of the error of their ways.