[Development] How to get Qt_5.9.1_PRIVATE_API

[Thiago Macieira]

On quinta-feira, 12 de outubro de 2017 08:31:12 PDT Rex Dieter wrote:
> Thiago Macieira wrote:
> > On quarta-feira, 11 de outubro de 2017 13:39:03 PDT Rex Dieter wrote:
> >> The patch's purpose looks appealing, are there "reasons(tm)" it cannot be
> >> used by default upstream?
> > 
> > Yeah: we don't want to.
> > 
> > It would make the lives of the developers harder: you'd have to recompile
> > everything the moment that the version was bumped and it would make
> > impossible to mix libraries in order to bisect issues.
> 
> Shouldn't private api users recompile everything anyway?  That's essentially
> what downstreams need to do, why are "developers" any different?

In theory yes, in practice no. See my response to Allan.

> Otherwise, what's the point of introducing this at all?  (Yes, it is one
> small baby step in the right direction as-is, but the suse patch takes the
> final big step, imo).

The point of the ELF version was to help you the distributions detect which 
ones need rebuilding by having the symbol show up. Having the symbol rename 
all the time doesn't make the distro-building more robust, since the previous 
symbols would just disappear and new ones would appear, possibly causing 
breakages. Packagers still need to figure out a way to cause that rebuild 
anyway.

The advantage is that you simply run a binary that was wasn't rebuilt. The 
disadvantage is that you cannot run a binary that wasn't rebuilt.

Also note that distros apply patches without changing the version number, some 
of which could change the private API.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago.macieira (AT) intel.com
  Software Architect - Intel Open Source Technology Center