A new tool for backward compatibility analysis of API/ABI interfaces in Deb packages

[Ponomarenko Andrey <andrewponomarenko@yandex.ru>]

Hello,

I'd like to present a new free tool for maintainers of software libraries — Package ABI Diff Tool (Pkg-ABIdiff). It's a tool for backward compatibility analysis of API/ABI interfaces in Deb packages. The tool is based on ABI Compliance Checker and ABI Dumper tools.

The tool does the following:

    1. Extracts input packages
    2. Searches for *.debug, *.so and header files
    3. Creates ABI dumps of all found shared objects
    4. Filters out private part of the ABI using info from header files
    5. Matches shared objects in old and new packages
    6. Compares ABI dumps of corresponding objects
    7. Creates backward binary compatibility (BC) report
    8. Creates backward source compatibility (SC) report

The tool is intended for Linux maintainers who are interested in ensuring backward compatibility, i.e. allow old applications to run (BC) or to be recompiled (SC) with newer versions of Deb packages.

Home page: https://github.com/lvc/pkg-abidiff

Usage: pkg-abidiff -old P1 P1-DEBUG P1-DEV -new P2 P2-DEBUG P2-DEV

  P1 — Deb package to analyze (with *.so object files)
  P1-DEBUG — corresponding debug-info package (*.debug files with DWARF info)
  P1-DEV — corresponding development package (with header files)

Report example for libssh 0.5.4 vs 0.6.3: https://abi-laboratory.pro/examples/compat_report/amd64/libssh-4/0.5.4-1+deb7u3/0.6.3-4+deb8u2/

Enjoy!