[systemd-devel] Can apps ship their own copy of libudev?

[Kay Sievers]

On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 3:15 PM, Laszlo Papp <lpapp at kde.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 24, 2013 at 2:09 PM, Kay Sievers <kay at vrfy.org> wrote:

>> No, you cannot really ship your own libudev, it is coupled with the
>> daemon. They speak a non-trivial wire protocol and write udev database
>> files which are a private implementation only; they changed in the
>> past, and might change at any time again. Libudev and udevd can only
>> be used in the same version.

> Do you provide some compatibility for a reasonable time to accommodate the
> existing users to switch onto the changed wired protocol?

No, the daemon and the lib need to be updated at the same time, there
is no promise about compat in any direction, they just belong
together.

> Failing that, what
> would you suggest for the Qt developers? Is there an alternative solution to
> keep udev in the loop without building two separate packages, or
> distribution dependent packages?

Libudev0 and libudev1 are almost API compatible, only a few pointless
functions are no longer provided by the new library. There should be
no problem at compilation time, both versions should work fine. Things
built by distributions should not notice anything, but for binary
compatibility across different versions of libraries, I have no
sensible idea, sorry.

Kay