Clarification concerning ABI, symbols, and internal/external use

Dear all

Debian maintainer of Plasma etc here. In our recent transition getting Plasma 5.20.4 into testing we saw that considerable numbers of symbols exported have changed, which impacts mixed updates.

From our side we have two options to deal with this, depending on the intended use within Plasma and around:

• the library is used only internally used: the we can just stop tracking symbols, and provide a virtual versioned package for proper upgrade
• the library is/will be public: then we need to do full symbol tracking and ABI bumps if necessary.

If you could clarify your position on this, it would be very helpful for us.

Thanks a lot for your permanent work and all the best

Norbert