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

[Dodji Seketeli]

> On Mon, 08 Jun 2015, Nikos Mavrogiannopoulos wrote:

[...]

>> I have not seen the output of abicheck (I use abi-compliance-checker
>> personally but I guess abidiff is as good).

It's abidiff :-)

>> 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.

Alexander Bokovoy <abokovoy at redhat.com> a écrit:

> Adding new functions to ABI constitute changes that don't break existing
> users as long as previously available data structures are not
> affected.

Yes.

Though, in this particular case, you can invoke "abidiff" in a way that
makes it not mention these new function additions.

You can, for instance, invoke it in a way that makes it show only the
exported functions/variables that got removed, as well as those
functions/variables for which sub-types have changed in their
signatures.

These have more chance to be ABI related issues.  The "interesting" case
in my opinion is when the functions/variables have sub-type changes
which doesn't cause any underlying ELF symbol name change.  It's usually
In those cases that we might need a qualified user to review "the abi
diff" to tell if it constitutes an ABI breakage or not.

Cheers,

-- 
		Dodji