RFC: removing talloc for good?

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Harald Welte laforge at gnumonks.org
Sat Nov 21 14:02:22 UTC 2015


Hi all,

I've been looking into upgrading our copy of talloc.[ch] in libosmocore,
but unlike 7 years ago, it is not that easy anymore.  The build system
integration is quite heavy, and it might be a good point to simply drop
talloc from libosmocore.

Also contrary to 7 years ago, distributions tend to ship libtalloc these
days.  So there's not really any reason to continue shiping it.

Right now I'm making it optional, and have sorted out how to make this
source compatible.  But this generates runtime incompabilities, due to
the ABI incompabibilities between our ancient talloc and current talloc :(

While the API of our talloc and current talloc seems compatible, the ABI
is not.  For example, they changed talloc_free() into an inline function
resulting in calls to _talloc_free(), while our code links directly
against talloc_free().

So We'd have to move from libosmocore-6.0.0 to 7.0.0 as part of the
transition and cannot really keep both options without causing
additional compatibility issues to our users.

So the question is: Why bother? does anyone have objections to removing
the built-in talloc?

-- 
- Harald Welte <laforge at gnumonks.org>           http://laforge.gnumonks.org/
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