On 4 June 2015 at 06:21, Stephen Gallagher <sgallagh(a)redhat.com> wrote:
On Wed, 2015-06-03 at 08:43 -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
==============================
== Stable API Documentation ==
==============================
=== Benefits ===
Having a Fedora-provided repository of the specific set of API (and
ABI) that we guarantee stability or backwards-compatibility will go a
long way towards addressing the concerns around our lack of an LTS
release. Additionally, it will make life easier for our users to have a
single source to look for documentation, rather than the current
situation of having to search out each upstream for documentation.
=== Issues/Risks ===
* Requires a large time commitment from someone on the Fedora Docs
team to collate the documentation and post it to the Fedora
Documentation site.
* Requires developer effort to locate and identify the stable APIs
* Almost certainly cannot all be done in a single release
=== Recommendations ===
* Locate someone from Fedora Docs to do the collation
* Start with a set of known-stable APIs (such as glibc and systemd)
and publish those for Fedora 23.
What guarentees does systemd have towards API's? They seem to be at
least adding new features all the time which would mean that the API
is getting larger over a release set. Which probably goes towards
having a definition of stable that we 'guarentee' as some see stable
as nothing be added and others see items not getting removed.
Also what level of API/ABI definitions are we looking as being
'published'. Getting a list of calls might be easy, but defining what
each call does would take time. [Past projects of standalone software
was on the order of 3-5 months depending on the level of detail
required.]
=========================
== API break detection ==
=========================
=== Benefits ===
Provide a taskotron process that will identify API and ABI breaks for
common languages when updates are submitted to Bodhi. If such are
detected, we should disable autopush-by-karma. This will allow us to be
able to better avoid incompatible updates in stable releases of Fedora.
=== Issues/Risks ===
* Tooling needs to be implemented. (Some help may be available from
libabigail[1])
* Someone needs to write a taskotron process that will run when
updates are created
* Available tools for this are currently limited to C/C++ ELF
libraries
=== Recommendations ===
Search out someone to do this work. It is high value for comparatively
little work (since much of the hard work has been solved by
libabigail). Volunteers highly requested.
It would be worthwhile to start with C/C++ and see how things progress
from there.
[1]
https://sourceware.org/libabigail/
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--
Stephen J Smoogen.