svn commit: r195767 - in head: . cddl/lib cddl/lib/libctf cddl/lib/libdtrace gnu/lib/libdialog gnu/lib/libg2c gnu/lib/libobjc gnu/lib/libreadline gnu/lib/libregex lib lib/libalias/libalias lib/liba...

[John Baldwin]

On Tuesday 21 July 2009 11:00:27 am Gordon Tetlow wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 6:51 AM, John Baldwin <jhb at freebsd.org> wrote:
> 
> > I guess specifically I see a disconnect in that in our current policy we
> > trust
> > developers to know when a change is an ABI change for a library with
> > versioned symbols, but we don't trust them to know when a change is an ABI
> > change for a library without versioned symbols.  Either we trust 
developers
> > to recognize an ABI change or not.  Whether or not the library has
> > versioned
> > symbols doesn't change that, and the resulting mess if we get it wrong is
> > just as ugly in either case.
> 
> 
>  Is there a way to detect ABI changes automatically? Is there some tool that
> could be written to detect changes in ABI and throw warnings about in that
> case?

I am not aware of one, and I think it would be hard to detect things like
changes in structure layout (e.g. you can have an ABI change w/o changing
the size if you just reorder fields).  Even a tool that could check for a
subset of breakages would still be useful.

-- 
John Baldwin