Upcoming ABI Breakage in RELENG_7

[David Southwell]

On Wednesday 30 July 2008 07:27:27 Ian FREISLICH wrote:
> 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

Thanks that is very concise and very helpful.

Question is what is the best way to determine which programs (if any) depend 
upon fcntl or flock on a running system?

David