Jussi Pakkanen: The ABI stability matryoshka
Going from this we can find out the actual underlying problem, which is running programs of two different ABI versions at the same time on the same OS. The simple solution of rebuilding the world from scratch does not work. It could be done for the base platform but, due to business and other reasons, you can't enforce a rebuild of all user applications (and those users, lest we forget, pay a very hefty amount of money to OS vendors for the platform their apps run on). Mixing new and old ABI apps is fragile and might fail due to the weirdest of reasons no matter how careful you are. The problem is even more difficult in "rolling release" cases where you can't easily rebuild the entire world in one go such as Debian unstable, but we'll ignore that case for now.
It turns out that there already exists a solution for doing exactly this: Flatpak. Its entire reason of existance is to run binaries with different ABI (and even API) on a given Linux platform while making it appear as if it was running on the actual host. There are other ways of achieving the same, such as Docker or systemd-nspawn, but they aim to isolate the two things from each other rather than unifying them. Thus a potential solution to the problem is that whenever an OS breaks ABI compatibility in a major way (which should be rare, like once every few years) it should provide the old ABI version of itself as a Flatpak and run legacy applications that way.
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