Re: Future of Linux (.so contracts)

[Bruce Stephens <bruce@cenderis.demon.co.uk>]

Davide Bolcioni <davide.bolcioni@3di.it> writes:

> The concept seems very interesting to me, although I wonder if it is
> within the scope of LSB; I had the notion that its effort was
> concerned with standardizing existing development approaches.

Probably it's not [it being TenDRA].  On the other hand, having
available tools for checking conformance with LSB would be valuable.

> On the other hand, however, the above approach as far as I can see
> does not address one of my major concerns, namely the fact that in a
> library function there is more than the signature.

Absolutely.  As a trivial example: what does malloc(0) return?  I
suppose what my real point was: if the open source culture was such
that it was normal to provide a reasonably abstract declaration of
APIs to libraries, then probably people would want to specify their
semantics too.  (But the semantics would be informal, I suspect.
After all, how could it practically be otherwise?)

I'm not really suggesting that TenDRA provides anything really
compelling.  It provides a syntax that's a bit more abstract that
ordinary C header files, and some nice tools for fiddling with these
files.