[cmake-developers] Integrate API/ABI checker to the CMake

[Andrey Ponomarenko]

Hello,

I have an idea to improve the CMake build system by integrating with the 
abi-compliance-checker [1] tool. It's a tool for checking for API/ABI 
backward compatibility of C/C++ libraries. In the Java world there is an 
alternative tool called Clirr, which is already integrated to the Ant 
and Maven build systems as a plug-in. But there is no such thing in the 
C/C++ world yet. So, people have to create custom scripts (phonon/cmake 
[2], mysql++/make [3], ...) to integrate the abi-compliance-checker tool 
into the build system.

It would be great if CMake users could be able to check API/ABI changes 
using two easy built-in CMake commands: "make abidump" and "make 
abicheck", without the need to understand how the abi-compliance-checker 
tool works. The first command ("make abidump") should create a snapshot 
of a "stable" library ABI, which will be compared with the next releases 
by the second command ("make abicheck"):

"make abidump": abi-compliance-checker --lib=name --dump=v1.xml 
--dump-path=snapshot-v1.abi.tar.gz
"make abicheck": abi-compliance-checker --lib=name 
--d1=snapshot-v1.abi.tar.gz --d2=v2.xml

v1.xml and v2.xml are XML-descriptors of old (snapshot) and new 
(current) versions of a library(ies):

<version>
     1.0
</version>

<headers>
/directory/with/headers/
</headers>

<libs>
/directory/with/libraries/
</libs>

I'm not familiar with the CMake internals and cannot implement this 
feature by myself. It would be great if some experts in CMake could 
write it. Considering the great number of C/C++ libraries using CMake, 
this feature should make upstream development of C/C++ libraries more 
stable.

Thanks!

[1] http://forge.ispras.ru/projects/abi-compliance-checker
[2] 
https://projects.kde.org/projects/kdesupport/phonon/phonon/repository/revisions/8f6dd7b114773cb83920ddf73b16e4a35883d746 

[3] http://svn.gna.org/viewcvs/mysqlpp/trunk/mysql%2B%2B.bkl?view=markup

-- 
Andrey Ponomarenko
Department for Operating Systems at ISPRAS
  web:    http://www.LinuxTesting.org
  mail:   aponomarenko at ispras.ru

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