Re: Stable library ABI compatibility checking

[Ian Jackson <iwj@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Andrew Cooper writes ("Stable library ABI compatibility checking"):
> What I propose is tweaking the library build to write out
> lib$FOO.so.$X.$Y-$(ARCH).abi.dump files.

+1

>   A pristine set of these should be put somewhere on xenbits, and a
> task put on the release technicians checklist for future releases.

I would rather shrink that checklist than grow it.  It's too full of
crazy manual steps as-is.  When we have the relevant changes in
xen.git I will see about making a cron job.

> To make the pristine set, I need to retrofit the tooling to 4.14 and
> ideally 4.13.  This is in contravention to our normal policy of not
> backporting features, but I think, being optional build-time-only
> tooling, it is worthy of an exception considering the gains we get
> (specifically - to be able to check for ABI breakages on these branches
> in OSSTest).  Backporting to 4.12 and older is far more invasive, due to
> it being before the library build systems were common'd.

I'm comfortable with the backports assuming that code review of the
makefile changes can persuade me that there is no change to the
default behaviour.

Ian.