unversioned public libraries in Samba (was: Re: ntdb in Samba?)

[Jelmer Vernooij]

On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 03:04:35PM +0100, Volker Lendecke wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 02:58:14PM +0100, Jelmer Vernooij wrote:
> > > The middle ground is still private libraries with no promises, but we
> > > pay a little bit more attention and try to warn known users when we
> > > change them. They still are private interfaces with no promises for any
> > > random user.
> > Agreed. These are somewhere in between private and public. Which of the two we
> > call them I think is less relevant; the main point is that they come without any
> > promises about stability.
> 
> But if we now promise to warn users, we need the full
> library check engine in place I guess.

Some automation to catch this kind of problem would indeed be helpful here,
and perhaps it would help if we had a wiki page somewhere that listed
what APIs are being used by other projects so that we know in what areas
to be careful with changes.

The current ABI checker that we use for tdb/talloc/ldb is pretty basic
and only checks function prototypes, not changes to structs.

Perhaps a good first start would be a script that simply displays
changes to installed headers. 

Essentially `git diff` on a list of filenames that are reported to be for
installed headers by waf.

Cheers,

Jelmer