Conda-forge.github.io: Generating our own ABI reports

[jakirkham]

It has become such a common thing to worry about ABI compatibility here that I wonder if we shouldn't have a mechanism to generate and publish our own ABI reports using binaries we have built. This probably will be really useful in a few months. Most of the time spent in the near term will just be trying to determine and summarize this information.

[jankatins]

See also https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-sharedlibs.html#s-sharedlibs-symbols (shlibs is probably easier to implement for conda...) which is probably more than you are asking for here... :-)

[jakirkham]

I'm thinking of something mind numbingly simple. For instance, this ABI report for FFmpeg. There are a bunch of Perl tools that we could use to do this or we can take inspiration from them and add similar things to our own Python scripts or conda directly.

[jankatins]

You need a DB for that, to collect the list of Symbols for each version or at least the last one... The debian script seems to do something similar by just looking at a file in the package -> if the file has something different, then it asks you to update the file which in turn triggers the increased versions for the dependency lines in the packages which depend on that package.

Windows could be a problem, because I guess that the ABI could be different for *ix and win.

[jakirkham]

xref: https://github.com/conda-forge/staged-recipes/issues/1601

cc @gqmelo

[jakirkham]

cc @patricksnape @183amir

[patricksnape]

I'm leaning towards thinking that this would be very useful.