Upcoming ABI Breakage in RELENG_7

[Ian FREISLICH]

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