Documentation about contributing to and running the testsuite

[Andrey Ponomarenko]

Hello,

Andreas Jaeger wrote:
> On 07/27/2012 04:36 PM, Andrey Ponomarenko wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> How about to add a note to this document about existing automated tools
>> that can be used to check for ABI compatibility issues:
>>
>>   * abi-compliance-checker: 
>> https://github.com/lvc/abi-compliance-checker
>
> I don't know about this tool and I'm curious:
> What does abi-compliance-checker bring us that "make check-abi" does 
> not handle?

According to the documentation [1], "make check-abi" checks "symbol 
names and versions and static variable sizes". In addition to this, the 
ABI compliance checker tool checks for changes in the layout and size of 
data structures, changes in enumerations and constants (#defines), 
changes in function parameters and return values, etc [2]. It also 
checks source-compatibility of the API.

The tool uses a concept of "ABI dump", that is similar to *.abilist, but 
includes much more ABI information. The ABI dump can be created for the 
reference glibc version, say 2.10, and compared with the ABI dumps 
created for newer versions of glibc.

Can I add a subsection to the "ABI check" section of this document [1] 
where I will explain how to run the tool on glibc?

[1] http://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/Testing/Testsuite#ABI_check
[2] 
http://ispras.linuxbase.org/index.php/ABI_compliance_checker#Detectable_Compatibility_Problems

Thank you.

>
> Andreas

-- 
Andrey Ponomarenko, ROSA Lab.