|
From: | Richard Frith-Macdonald |
Subject: | Checking breakage of backward compatibility |
Date: | Thu, 5 Oct 2006 11:45:02 +0100 |
On 4 Oct 2006, at 12:46, David Ayers wrote:
I'm almost indifferent on the subject. But in practice I believe peoplewill unknowingly break binary compatibility and forget to bump the SO name. I think this is worse than forcing folks to recompile apps just because the SO name bumped even though it didn't break binary compatibility.... but like I said. I wouldn't mind either way.
That worries me too ... but I think we *must* try to be strict about it.Is there any way we could devise an automated test for binary compatibility breakage?
It seems to me that it should be possible to catalogue and check externally available symbols (classes, functions, variables and constants) using standard tools to examine the binary. It should also be possible to write a small program to inspect the objc runtime to determine ivar layout and method signature changes.
Doing this would also be a useful exercise for finding out what things are currently publicly exposed and should not be.
Tests could be run nightly on the current SVN trunk, providing warnings telling us if we need to revert problematic changes made the previous day.
[Prev in Thread] | Current Thread | [Next in Thread] |