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

Alexander Bokovoy abokovoy at redhat.com
Mon Jun 8 08:53:18 UTC 2015


On Mon, 08 Jun 2015, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos wrote:
>On Mon, 2015-06-08 at 09:39 +0200, Dodji Seketeli wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
>I have not seen the output of abicheck (I use abi-compliance-checker
>personally but I guess abidiff is as good). However, I'm not sure about
>which changes which are not breakages you mean? I'm not aware of ABI
>changes which do not break users of libraries.
Adding new functions to ABI constitute changes that don't break existing
users as long as previously available data structures are not affected.
-- 
/ Alexander Bokovoy


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