On Friday 18 of October 2013 17:23:21 Michele Calgaro wrote:
> HI there,
> is anybody aware of any good reason why tdelibs14-trinity and some other
> packages have a very strict dependency on binutils in Debian Jessie and
> Wheezy (and I suspect also on previous versions and in Ubuntu, even though
> I didn't check)? For example I get dependencies such as:
> binutils (>= 2.23.52.20130828), binutils (<< 2.23.52.20130829).
>
> The problem with such kind of dependency is that when binutils is updated,
> I need to do a full rebuild of TDE before I can update the binutils package
> on my machine. After the full rebuild is completed, everything can be
> updated, but I don't see the reason for having the '<<' part of the
> dependency since it doesn't seem to affect anything: TDE builds with both
> the old and the new binutils package.
>
>
> So I am wondering if such strict dependency is intentional or if it is
> something that we are dragging along from the past (perhaps because of a
> broken or incompatible binutils version in the past).
>
> If there isn't any particular reason, I will open a bug report in a few
> days about this point.
>
> Thanks
>   Michele
>

Hi Michele,

explanation of very tight depending on binutils is simple:

For easier detection of particular bug were incorporated into kdesktop_lock 
function to generate backtrace (commit 786e248c - tdebase). Later the same 
function incorporated into tdeio (commit a166b1da - tdelibs). And lastly, 
both these functions were replaced with improved function kdBacktrace in 
kdebug (commit a5ba7ad7 - tdelibs).

This implementation uses for generate backtraces library bfd from binutils. 
And this library is causing this problem with a very tight dependency. This 
library is always one specific version and does not allow even a small 
difference. For example on Debian Squeeze: libbfd-2.20.1-system.20100303.so

For this reason, wherever it is used kdBacktrace => is dependent on libbfd => 
is so strict dependency on a particular version of binutils.

The solution would be if instead of linking the library dynamically loaded. 
But it can be a problem when that will happen in a crash handler => in an 
emergency situation.

-- 
Slavek