PkgDiff 1.6 - Added compatibility check

PkgDiff tool is developed to visualize changes in files and attributes of all types of Linux software packages and is intended to be used by maintainers and QA-engineers in order to verify changes and prevent unintentional changes, which can break other packages in the repository. One of the most significant elements in the structure of the Linux distribution are system libraries. Average Linux distribution contains several thousand libraries and they have a huge number of internal dependencies. For this reason, an update of a library can break the build or behavior of other libraries and eventually lead to malfunction of user applications.

In the new version of the PkgDiff tool (1.6) we have added the ability to check the compatibility of changes in libraries. This was made possible due to a new ABI Dumper tool, which can extract information about the library ABI from the debug-files, which can then be analyzed by the ABI Compliance Checker tool. To check the compatibility of two packages A and B (old and new versions of a package), the user should pass appropriate debug-packages to the tool and run it with the additional -details option:

pkgdiff -old A-debuginfo.rpm -new B-debuginfo.rpm -details

We have added the new ABI Status section to the output report, which shows the backward compatibility level of the library ABI. To view detailed compatibility reports one can find the Debug Info Files table in the report and follow the links in the Detailed Report column.

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— Andrey.ponomarenko (talk) • 16:17, 10 June 2013 • no comments

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