Just to give an update on this topic to this list, I agreed with Hazen off list to make checking for backwards-incompatible changes in our API with abi-compliance-checker as easy as possible for him. Accordingly, I have made some good initial progress with creating scripts/check_backwards_incompatible_api.sh, a bash script to build and install the working copy of PLplot from the local directory where the script resides and to build and install a reference version of PLplot specified by the user (5.9.6 by default). The bash script also processes a template file with sed to create appropriate abi-compliance-checker *.xml files. Those files allow abi-compliance-checker to do its job comparing the ABI of the reference install with the working-copy install.
The Debian version 1.6 of abi-compliance checker doesn't work at all, but I discovered that a downloaded version 1.21.4 of this perl script works fine for simple PLplot libraries like libqsastime. That result was most encouraging. Therefore, I have checked in (revision 11164) what I have accomplished so far. Note my work is not ready for prime time yet. For example, if the two headers required for libqsastime are expanded to the full set of PLplot headers abi-compliance-checker currently stops with a compile error. This weekend, I hope to rectify this issue and others to achieve the goal of making Hazen's API checking life as simple as possible for each of our C and C++ libraries. Alan __________________________ Alan W. Irwin Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca). Programming affiliations with the FreeEOS equation-of-state implementation for stellar interiors (freeeos.sf.net); PLplot scientific plotting software package (plplot.org); the libLASi project (unifont.org/lasi); the Loads of Linux Links project (loll.sf.net); and the Linux Brochure Project (lbproject.sf.net). __________________________ Linux-powered Science __________________________ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Start uncovering the many advantages of virtual appliances and start using them to simplify application deployment and accelerate your shift to cloud computing http://p.sf.net/sfu/novell-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Plplot-devel mailing list Plplot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plplot-devel
