Checking the ABI of packages submitted to the updates-testing Fedora repository

[Dodji Seketeli]

Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos <nmav at redhat.com> a écrit:

> On Fri, 2015-06-05 at 08:00 -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
>
>> > 
>> > and
>> > here is what stuck to my mind.  Others are of course welcome to add 
>> > 
>> > what
>> > I have forgotten and to correct me when I a wrong.
>> > 
>> > To start, we'd like to have an automated way to check the ABI
>> > compatibility of binaries embedded in packages that are submitted 
>> > to 
>> > the
>> > updates-testing repository.  When an incompatible change[1] is 
>> > detected,
>> 
>> Just to clarify, this isn't about the karma *count*, it's about 
>> whether
>> a package can be pushed to stable automatically when it reaches the
>> karma threshold or if it requires a conscious decision by the
>> maintainer to push it. This will present backwards-incompatible 
>> changes
>> from going to stable *accidentally*. (There are cases where they are
>> permissible, such as security patches or ABI changes that are
>> coordinated with all their consumers).
>
> I'd prefer that ABI never breaks within a stable fedora release unless
> there is some special permission for it. There can be no excuse
> "coordinated with all consumers", because there is also software in the end user's systems where we can have no 
> coordination.

Of course, nobody likes ABI *breakage*.  And I agree that if all ABI
breakage could be detected automatically, ABI breakages would never make
it into stable releases.

The thing is, the tool detects ABI *changes*.  Some changes are
breakages.  Some are not, depending on the particular context we are
looking at.  The tool does have heuristics to categorize certain changes
as being ABI breakages, but ultimately, I believe there is going to be
cases where human intervention is going to be necessary to tell if a
given change is harmful or not.  And it's going to be so for the
foreseeable future.  You can think of it as a kind of patch review, but
for ABI changes specifically.

Cheers,

-- 
		Dodji