[getdns-users] [PATCH] remove GETDNS_COMPILATION_COMMENT

[Daniel Kahn Gillmor]

Hi Scott--

Thanks for the quick response!  I'm not sure of the answer to your
questions, but i want to better understand why you want this info, and
how it's useful.  Maybe i'm missing a use case, in which case i'd
happily withdraw my suggestion here.

On Wed 2015-07-08 13:58:56 -0400, Hollenbeck, Scott wrote:
> I'm currently using GETDNS_COMPILATION_COMMENT in the PHP language
> bindings to display the getdns library version used to build the PHP
> extension.

How do you expect users (PHP developers, presumably) to actually use
this?  If the PHP binding uses shared libraries (links against
libgetdnsapi.so.1 or whatever), what guarantees do your users have about
what code they're actually running against?

> If GETDNS_COMPILATION_COMMENT goes away is there another way of
> retrieving the getdns library version information at compilation time?

Why does library version information (other than the
traditionally-tracked SONAME/ABI versioning scheme, which should be
handled automatically during compilation based on -L) matter at compile
time?

getting library version information at runtime seems like it could be
useful (e.g. we could introduce a const char* getdns_version_string()),
but GETDNS_COMPILATION_COMMENT isn't useful for that in the first place,
since it's a build-time and not a runtime setting.

      --dkg
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