Hello!

I stumbled across a strange glitch and not for the first time. Did a pkg
upgrade, which updated Qt (new minor version). This breaks all Qt apps
installed via pkg since they were built against a different minor version
of Qt, but were not rebuilt and pushed to the repository along with Qt.
Qt checks the library versions on startup, so you notice this immediately.
The current behavior (or lack of behavior) however could affect __all__
applications, even those that link only against plain C libraries. It's
rare, but you can't exclude that some minor library release breaks the API
- ABI is of course not a problem in C, compared to C++.

Workaround is to (re)build the corresponding application manually from the
ports tree. This can take hours, so IMHO this is a serious issue.
It is NOT sufficient to reinstall the package in question - it obviously
didn't change in the repository.

I would therefore think that every library change should result in a
rebuild of all dependant packages and automatic bumping of the package version.

Why is this not done? And where should we file a bug report?

Best regards,
Robin

It appears that Robin Haberkorn <robin.haberkorn@googlemail.com> said:
>applications, even those that link only against plain C libraries. It's
>rare, but you can't exclude that some minor library release breaks the API
>- ABI is of course not a problem in C, compared to C++.

The difference between a minor and major version is that minor versions have
the same interfaces. If the interfaces change, thaat's a major version.

It sounds like the bug is that a breaking change was shipped as a minor version
rather than a major one.

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

On Sat, 19 Oct 2024, John Levine wrote:

> The difference between a minor and major version is that minor versions have
> the same interfaces. If the interfaces change, thaat's a major version.
>
That's how it should be, but since the version comes from upstream, you
can't be sure about it.

> It sounds like the bug is that a breaking change was shipped as a minor version
> rather than a major one.
>

I am no longer that sure about it.
I recompiled my VirtualBox port and it did __not__ resolve the issue.
Then I did `pkg install --force qt5-style-plugins`.
That did the job. Obviously the package already was automatically rebuilt,
but the version was not bumped, so pkg upgrade wouldn't pick it up
automatically. If the rebuild of VirtualBox really was necessary - who
knows. At least force-reinstalling it via pkg wasn't enough.

There definitely is some kind of bug.