Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:27:27 +0200 From: Ian FREISLICH <ianf@clue.co.za> To: David Southwell <david@vizion2000.net> Cc: Ken Smith <kensmith@cse.buffalo.edu>, freebsd-stable@freebsd.org, freebsd-current <freebsd-current@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Upcoming ABI Breakage in RELENG_7 Message-ID: <E1KOCeF-0001Bi-Oo@clue.co.za> In-Reply-To: <200807300247.34948.david@vizion2000.net> References: <200807300247.34948.david@vizion2000.net> <1217346345.12322.31.camel@bauer.cse.buffalo.edu>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
David Southwell wrote: > On Tuesday 29 July 2008 08:45:45 Ken Smith wrote: > > Normally the FreeBSD Project tries very hard to avoid ABI breakage in > > "Stable Branches". However occasionally the fix for a bug can not be > > Sometimes information gets posted to this list on the assumption that > everyone understand what the writer means. > > This is one of those occasions!! > > For those of us who are not as well informed and experienced as others > could someone please explain what is meant by an ABI breakage, its > implications and how to deal with them. Within a major release, the project tries very hard to maintain Binary Interface campatibility, or stability. In fact as far as I know, this is where the name "Stable Branch" originates. What this means is that a binary compiled on 7.0-RELEASE should continue to work without needing to be recompiled over the lifetime of the 7 branch. ABI breakage that Ken refers to here means that a change required to fix a bug cannot be made while maintaining binary compatibility with previous versions. Any program that makes use of (I'm guessing) fcntl(2) or flock(2) that runs on 7.0, will not run on >= 7.1 without being recompiled. Ian -- Ian Freislich
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?E1KOCeF-0001Bi-Oo>