ABI compliance checker

[Colin Walters]

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 10:35 AM, Andrey Ponomarenko<susanin at ispras.ru> wrote:

Hi,

>    Colleagues, I'm software engineer from Institute for System
> Programing of Russian Academy of Sciences and we are developing a free
> lightweight tool for checking backward/forward binary compatibility of
> shared C/C++ libraries in OS Linux. It checks interface signatures and
> data type definitions in two library versions (headers and shared
> objects) and searches ABI changes that may lead to incompatibility.
> We have released 1.1 version of this tool and we'd like you to consider
> its usefulness for your project.

This sounds very useful!  Ideally, we would run this tool
automatically for the OS core and ABI changes would require signoff of
some sort, and unless absolutely necessary were reverted.

Tools like this though are at their most effective when they catch
changes upstream not long after they're committed, before downstreams
have at some indeterminate time incremented integers in .spec files or
equivalent to distribute the changes.