libabigail
The ABI Generic Analysis and Instrumentation Library

Presentation

This project aims at providing a C++ library for constructing, manipulating, serializing and de-serializing ABI-relevant artifacts. The set of artifacts that we are interested in is made of constructions like types, variables, functions and declarations of a given library or program. For a given program or library, this set of constructions is called an ABI corpus.

Thus the project aims at providing a library to manipulate ABI corpora, compare them, provide detailed information about their differences and help build tools to infer interesting conclusions about these differences.

Documentation

The documentations of the libabigail tools is available online here.

The html documentation of the API of the library itself is available online here.

IRC and Mailing lists

To hang out with libabigail developers and users, you can chat with us via IRC at irc://irc.oftc.net#libabigail.

To send us patches or just drop by to say Hi, please send an email to our mailing list at the address 'libabigail <at> sourceware <dot> org'. The archives of the mailing list can be read online. To send us an email, you first need to register to the mailing list by feeling this form.

Bug reports

Bug reports are to be filed into our Bugzilla database.

License

The source code of the library is under the Apache version 2 license with the LLVM exception.

Getting the source code

You can download compressed tarballs containing the source code of Libabigail at http://mirrors.kernel.org/sourceware/libabigail. The latest released version of is source code is http://mirrors.kernel.org/sourceware/libabigail/libabigail-2.5.tar.xz.

You can also get the source code in a read-only manner from our Git repository by doing:

git clone git://sourceware.org/git/libabigail.git

If you have write access on sourceware.org, you can check the source out in read-write by doing:

git clone ssh://sourceware.org/git/libabigail.git

Compiling the source code

To compile libabigail, you first need to install its dependencies. At the moment the dependencies are the following Free Software packages:

Compiling the code from the tarball

Once you've downloaded the tarball, please extract its content to a directory of your choice. To extract the tarball on GNU/Linux, please type:

tar -xvf libabigail-<version>.tar.gz

This should create a directory libabigail-<version>.

Then go to that directory and run the commands:

mkdir build
cd build
../configure --prefix=/where/you/want/to/install/libabigail
make all install

Make sure the directory /where/you/want/to/install/libabigail exists and is writeable by you.

The commands above should have built libabigail and its associated tools, and installed them under /where/you/want/to/install/libabigail. Note that built objects are under the build sub-directory of the source tree of Libabigail which you extracted from the tarball.

Compiling the code retrieved via the source code repository

Go to your local libabigail.git directory where the source code you've checked out lies and create a 'build' directory that will receive the binaries resulting from the compilation:

cd libabigail
mkdir build

Generate the relevant build-system-related information needed to configure the package for compilation, by typing:

autoreconf -i

Then configure the package:

cd build
../configure --prefix=<absolute-path-of-where-you-want-the-binaries-to-be-installed>

Then build the package

make

And then install its resulting binaries and documentation:

make install