reduced link interface: some link breakage possible

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Tuesday 16 December 2008, Richard Moore wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 11:51 PM, Matthew Woehlke
>
...
> > The original post clearly stated that you may "get some undefined symbols
> > when linking".
>
> Surely that's against our compatibility policies then? AFAIK this is
> supposed to be guaranteed through a major release cycle.

Yes, it kind-of breaks source compatiblity, and this should not happen. We 
could argue that something which was linking before and doesn't link now was 
actually broken and was working only accidentially.
I brought this issue up in May:
http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-buildsystem&m=121011139531168&w=2

Anyway, we don't really have a choice.
Debian ships KDE with these changes applied (since a few months already), so 
they are already incompatible with what we release right now.
SUSE and RedHat (or Fedora) packagers also expressed interest in these patches 
and that they would use it (I don't know if they already do).
So independent from whether we break this now or not, most users will get KDE 
with these changes applied through their distros.

And in that case it's better we do it now, so we, the developers can make sure 
it works, and all users get versions which are compatible among each other, 
instead of of each distros patches KDE and ships something we don't know and 
which can differ from distro to distro.

This issue was brought up just April this year, i.e. after 4.0 had been 
released. We didn't make it for 4.1, but, now we really should, IMO have to, 
do it :-/

Alex