Re: Maintaining ABI Compatibility for LTS branch

[Steve Sakoman <steve@sakoman.com>]

On Tue, Feb 8, 2022 at 1:07 PM Richard Purdie
<richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
>
> Forwarding to the correct list address and cc the LTS maintainer.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Richard
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Sinan Kaya <okaya@kernel.org>
> To: Richard Purdie <richard.purdie@linuxfoundation.org>, Paul Eggleton <bluelightning@bluelightning.org>, Yocto list discussion <yocto@yoctoproject.org>
> Cc:
> Bcc:
> Date: Sun, 6 Feb 2022 20:14:37 -0500
> Subject: Maintaining ABI Compatibility for LTS branch
> Hi Everyone,
>
> One of the limitations of Yocto LTS branch is that there is no
> guaranteed backwards compatibility. Therefore, any time we move a branch
> forward to move to latest dunfell release, we are taking a risk of
> breaking our customers.

I'd be interested in hearing about any cases where we've broken things!

In general I don't take version upgrades (other than bug fix/cve fix
only dot releases)

> Yocto reserves the right to move a package version forward if a
> security fix cannot be applied properly as an example.

These cases should be extremely rare, and the community/technical
steering committee is given an opportunity to review this before it
happens.

I'm certainly open to suggestions on how we can do better.

I'd love to see some tooling to do ABI checking!

Steve

> This promise is being held true on the kernel by running kernel API
> tests etc. and running test benches across different CI environments.
>
> I was curious about how everyone is approaching this problem.
> There was some attempt to bring ABI checking functionality in the past
> but this has never been merged.
>
> Is everyone rolling their own solution? or never moving forward?
>
> Sinan
>