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 FreislichReceived on Wed Jul 30 2008 - 12:47:22 UTC
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