Usage of our developer tools in upstream

During the development of operating systems, our developers and maintainers use a huge variety of program tools (in order to build packages, analyze code quality, verify changes in code, etc.). Most of the tools are available in almost any repository, such as, for example, rpmbuild, gcc, rpmlint, check, valgrind, diff, etc. But sometimes there are tasks for which tools have not yet been created. In such cases, we create our own tools for developers. If these tools can be helpful not only for us but also for the community, then we publish their source code.

An example of one of the non-standard tasks was to analyze the backward API/ABI compatibility of system libraries in our operating system ROSA. Because the number of libraries in the system reaches several thousands, the manual tracking of changes was too difficult task. Therefore, we have developed the ABICC tool, that can automatically analyze the compatibility of changes in libraries. The source code of this tool have been published and gradually more and more upstream developers use this tool to control API/ABI compatibility of interfaces in their libraries. As a result, our maintainers can easier update appropriate packages for such libraries.

Examples of libraries successfully using our tools are: Pacemaker, MySQL++, Wireshark, Glibc, Enlightenment, libDAP++, libapt, Barry, PySide, PLplot, etc. Also, quite a number of library developers prefer to use our special service Upstream Tracker, where they can be free add any library and monitor changes in its API/ABI interface. Examples of such libraries are ImageMagick, V8, etc.

Our most popular open-source tools for developers can be found here. Among them are the following tools:

ABICC

a tool to check backward API/ABI compatibility of system libraries.

PkgDiff

a tool to classify files and visualize changes in source packages.

Java ACC

analogue of ABICC for Java libraries.

API Sanity Checker

an automatic generator of automatic unit tests for C/C++ libraries.

ABI Dumper

extract ABI structure from the debug-info of a shared library.

Vtable Dumper

list content of virtual tables in a shared library.

We encourage upstream developers to use our tools. This can improve the quality and stability of their API/ABI interfaces. And moreover this simplifies updating of appropriate packages in operating systems.

— Andrey.ponomarenko (talk) • 11:57, 30 April 2014 • no comments

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