[gdal-dev] GDAL 3.1.0 RC2 available

[Greg Troxel]

Even Rouault <even.rouault at spatialys.com> writes:

>> What I menat is that in the text of NEWS, you should not say that 
> the C
>> ABI is unchanged.   A "ABI has not changed" statement implies that 
> one
>> can swap in the new binaries without rebuilding any depending 
> packages.
>
> That would be true: you could replace the .so of GDAL 3.0 by the one 
> of 3.1 if the library/application that link to GDAL only use the C ABI. 
> But given that the .so name will change, you'll probably have to 
> recompile it anyway, unless you (ab)use symlinks tricks.

Exactly, so from a "build the new release, remove all files from
previous build, and put the new files in place" point of view, there is
an ABI break, and programs compiled against the old one will fail.
Hence packaging systems need to treat this as an ABI break, and NEWS
should say that.