backward/forward binary compatibility checker

Andrey Ponomarenko · External Since: Aug 06, 2009 Posts: 1

Colleagues, I'm software engineer from Institute for System
Programing of Russian Academy of Sciences and we are developing a free
lightweight tool for checking backward/forward binary compatibility of
shared C/C++ libraries in OS Linux. It checks interface signatures and
data type definitions in two library versions (headers and shared
objects) and searches ABI changes that may lead to incompatibility.
We have released 1.1 version of this tool and we'd like you to consider
its usefulness for your project.
The wiki-page with the latest release of binary compatibility checker is
http://ispras.linux-foundation.org/index.php/ABI_compliance_checker

Andrey Ponomarenko

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Paul Wise · External Since: Jan 30, 2007 Posts: 81

[CCing you since I presume you are not subscribed to debian-devel]
[CCing the Debian release team since they may be interested]

On Thu, Aug 6, 2009 at 4:38 PM, Andrey Ponomarenko<susanin.RemoveThis@ispras.ru> wrote:

> Colleagues, I'm software engineer from Institute for System
> Programing of Russian Academy of Sciences and we are developing a free
> lightweight tool for checking backward/forward binary compatibility of
> shared C/C++ libraries in OS Linux. It checks interface signatures and
> data type definitions in two library versions (headers and shared
> objects) and searches ABI changes that may lead to incompatibility.
> We have released 1.1 version of this tool and we'd like you to consider
> its usefulness for your project.
> The wiki-page with the latest release of binary compatibility checker is
> http://ispras.linux-foundation.org/index.php/ABI_compliance_checker

That sounds extremely useful for Debian and other free software
distributions. Please notify at least Fedora, I suggest writing an
article about it for LWN (http://lwn.net) though. Have you considered
packaging it for Debian so that library maintainers can use it to
check their packages or the release managers could use it to block
libraries with broken ABIs (for example)?

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bye,
pabs

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Guillem Jover · External Since: Nov 13, 2004 Posts: 478

Hi!

On Thu, 2009-08-06 at 18:38:41 +0400, Andrey Ponomarenko wrote:
> Colleagues, I'm software engineer from Institute for System
> Programing of Russian Academy of Sciences and we are developing a free
> lightweight tool for checking backward/forward binary compatibility of
> shared C/C++ libraries in OS Linux. It checks interface signatures and
> data type definitions in two library versions (headers and shared
> objects) and searches ABI changes that may lead to incompatibility.
> We have released 1.1 version of this tool and we'd like you to consider
> its usefulness for your project.
> The wiki-page with the latest release of binary compatibility checker is
> http://ispras.linux-foundation.org/index.php/ABI_compliance_checker

How does this compare with projects like icheck or abicheck?

regards,
guillem

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George Danchev · External Since: Jul 01, 2005 Posts: 227

--cut--
> > The wiki-page with the latest release of binary compatibility checker
> > is http://ispras.linux-foundation.org/index.php/ABI_compliance_checker
>
> This looks like an extremely useful piece of software (in the past
> I've thought "I wish there were a tool to do this" Smile

). I'll package
> it for Debian.

Hi,
There is also icheck package available in Debian for some years, but it
targets mainly C. Perhaps you can use it as a comparison tool when testing
this one.

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Paul Wise · External Since: Jan 30, 2007 Posts: 81

On Fri, Aug 7, 2009 at 3:41 AM, Guillem Jover <guillem.DeleteThis@debian.org> wrote:

> How does this compare with projects like icheck or abicheck?

icheck is fairly unmaintained, since upstream is a former Debian developer.

No idea about abicheck, perhaps you could compare them Andrey?

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pabs

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Steve Langasek · External Since: Dec 13, 2004 Posts: 2140

On Fri, Aug 07, 2009 at 04:57:38PM +0400, Andrey Ponomarenko wrote:
> 2) icheck was intended for the same purposes as an
> ABI-compliance-checker, but icheck has many drawbacks:

[...]

> c) icheck contains 467 files and 61 sub-folders;
> ABI-compliance-checker is a single file.

I am concerned that you think this is a feature.

> d) icheck searches changes in `gcc -E -x c-header header_name.h`
> output, that represent a header after preprocessing - it is a very
> inconveniently method because it need a lot of code for parsing header
> (about 750 kb of code); ABI-compliance-checker searches differences in
> the `gcc -fdump-translation-unit header_name.h` output, that represents
> a syntax tree of the header files.

I'm not familiar with -fdump-translation-unit. Is there any possibility
that ABI-compliance-checker will overlook ABI changes that icheck will
catch?

Does ABI-compliance-checker's representation of the ABI behave in an
architecture-independent fashion, so that it's possible to draw conclusions
about ABIs on other architectures than the architecture on which you're
running the check?

> e) as described in the documentation
> (http://www.digipedia.pl/man/icheck.1.html) icheck need three runs to
> get compatibility report - it is not easy.

Huh? You have to have a representation of the baseline ABI to compare
against. Does ABI-compliance-checker assume that both copies of the header
will be unpacked and available locally at the same time, in order to be able
to do everything in "one run"? That would be much less useful; we don't
want to have to carry around the actual headers or objects from the
reference version of the library in order to be able to run these tests, we
would want to be able to ship a "manifest" representation of the reference
ABI in our sources to compare against.

Cheers,
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Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
slangasek RemoveThis @ubuntu.com vorlon RemoveThis @debian.org

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