Re: Dealing with release mode

[Michi Henning <michi.henning@canonical.com>]

Hi Dodji,

thanks for the super-quick response again!

> I see.  There are some users who wants abidiff to behave "normally" even
> when there is no debug info.  In that case, it just tells you about
> added/removed symbols.

Right, I saw that.

OK, so if there are users who need the opposite behavior, a command-line option is the only option (pun intended).

> Right.  I guess we could add a --require-debug-info option to abidiff,
> or something like that.
> 
> When that option is provided, if the debug info data is empty, abidiff
> would return an exit code made of the flag ABIDIFF_EMPTY_DEBUG_INFO (a
> new value, possibly 16).

That sounds good. One concern thatâs sort of starting to loom on the horizon here: with 16 exit status, thatâs 5 bits out of 8 gone. As the tool evolves, I suspect that there might be more such edge-cases; it might be worth thinking about some other escape hatch. It would definitely be good to not use more than 6 bits, I suspect. That would allow the 7th bit to act as an escape hatch. (Setting the 8th bit is no good because then the shell will think it was a signal that stopped the process.)

> This new use case would be different from the already supported use case
> of not *finding* the debug info, for instance when the --debug-info-dir*
> options are provided.  In this already supported use case, the tool flat
> out returns an ABIDIFF_ERROR code (value 1).
> 
> Would that work for you?

Totally!

Iâll file an enhancement request.

Cheers

Michi.