Introducing abidiff (was Re: [Guielines Change] Changes to the packaging guidelines)

[Dodji Seketeli]

Hello,

Richard Shaw <hobbes1069 at gmail.com> a écrit:

[...]

>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Downstream_.so_name_versioning
>
>
> It's neat to see reference to abi-compliance-checker (hint, I maintain
> it!)

And thank you for maintaining it!  I believe that checking for ABI
compatibility is an important matter.

> but the link just points to the package. While it's not necessarily
> difficult to use, I wouldn't quite call it intuitive either.

Indeed.  And while we are in the "Shameless Plug" department, I'd like
to mention the presence of a new tool called 'abidiff'.  You can learn
about it at https://sourceware.org/libabigail/manual/abidiff.html.

It's a command line tool that compares the ABIs of two shared libraries
by looking *only* at the binaries and their debug info.  Unlike
abi-compliance-checker, it doesn't need to look at the associated header
files.  It can also do things that abi-compliance-checker cannot do,
like, *recursively* compare the types of the exported functions and
variables of the binaries.

And, unlike abi-compliance-checker, it's based on a library that people
can re-use to write their own tools to analyze and compare ABI
artifacts.

To have a better idea of what it can do and what it's output looks like,
you can check out the usage examples of abidiff at
https://sourceware.org/libabigail/manual/abidiff.html#usage-examples.

Oh, and the package is being reviewed to get into Fedora at
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1182261.

> Should some basic steps be added there? Or perhaps a link to another wiki
> page?

I'd be glad to mention abidiff on that page too, but as I don't intend
to force it upon you guys, I'd wait for folks to look at the tool
and say what they think first.

Cheers,

-- 
		Dodji