Re: EPICS release series after 7.0: 7.1 or 8.0?

[Wang Xiaoqiang via Tech-talk <tech-talk@aps.anl.gov>]

Hi Andrew,

Here is a test run between 3.14.12.7 and 3.14.12.8, (compiled with HOST_OPT=NO).
  https://xiaoqiangwang.github.io/epics-base-api-checker

It does not show any ABI breaking. Or is there something it does not detect, as 
Michael expects?

Best
Xiaoqiang

On 1/9/20 10:51 PM, Johnson, Andrew N. wrote:
> Hi Xiaoqiang,
>
> On 1/9/20 2:47 AM, Wang Xiaoqiang wrote:
> > It is understandable ABI/API compatibility has never been a concern of the 
> > core developers and an extra burden with no immediate benefits. But this 
> > becomes essential for sites (increasingly) using central deployment.
> Please note, API (i.e. source-code) compatibility between releases has been a 
> major concern of core developers for many years, I already described how we 
> treat that in another email in this thread. Our position on ABI compatibility 
> though has been that we don't have enough developers to promise that, so users 
> should recompile from source whenever they upgrade Base. By concentrating on API 
> compatibility we can reduce the burden on users when they do upgrade despite our 
> only having a small group of core developers. If ABI compatibility were really 
> essential to a site they would be throwing effort or money at us to actually 
> implement it (nobody has yet).
>
> > I assume this ABI checking can be one additional step in the CI script, using 
> > tools like abi-compliance-checker. It could then be used as a guideline in 
> > development. e.g. attached is a generated report of pvAccess library between 
> > 7.0.2 and 7.0.3.
> That output does look good, I'd love to see the tool being run automatically 
> against all our shared libraries whenever we commit changes to our Git repo's. 
> It would be interesting to see what results it gives for Michael's challenge.
>
> - Andrew
>
> --
> Complexity comes for free, Simplicity you have to work for.