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Re: [PATCH] Add new script add-abilist.py


On Thu, 5 Mar 2015, Carlos O'Donell wrote:

> (b) A trybot that you can use to scrape the results of `make update-abi`
>     which gives you perfect confidence that things are working as
>     expected.

One important case is that a bug in the change means that some 
architecture doesn't actually get the new function, and so if you don't 
update that architecture's ABI baselines in a way corresponding to other 
architectures, a make update-abi on that architecture results in no 
changes at all, and make check-abi does not fail there, and the new 
function is quietly missing there.

Manually updating ABIs, possibly helped by a script, to reflect the intent 
that the new function appears on all architectures, is one way to help 
avoid such bugs (by making them result in visible check-abi failures 
unless you accidentally miss updating the baselines for exactly the same 
architectures as miss the new functions).  Of course we should *also* add 
testcases that verify the new function calls at least link (even if no 
runtime test is possible without e.g. a new Linux kernel or running with 
privileges) - as that would also detect such problems.

(fallocate64 being added in 2.10 on 64-bit architectures but 2.11 on 
32-bit architectures 
<https://sourceware.org/ml/libc-hacker/2009-05/msg00003.html> is the 
prototypical example of a bug that could have been found this way.)

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
joseph@codesourcery.com


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