Re: ABI Compliance Checker GSoC Project

Back in January I wrote:
> "David E. Wheeler" <david(at)justatheory(dot)com> writes:
>> 3. Install the abigail suite; I believe the Debian packages are `abigail-tools` and `libabigail0`

> For those following along, on Red Hat-based systems it seems
> sufficient to install the libabigail package.
> Sadly, it seems we won't find a version of that that works on
> non-Linux platforms, because it's specific to ELF binary format.

That opinion was of course far too pessimistic, because at least
FreeBSD and NetBSD are now using ELF binary format. I had tried
it on FreeBSD many moons ago, found that abidw died with SIGSEGV,
and concluded that it was unsupported. But it turns out that was
because they were shipping an ancient version of libabigail.
What you can get now (at least on FreeBSD 15.1) is libabigail 2.9,
and that works about 99%. I've just done some successful smoke-tests
of that with the v21 buildfarm client:

* REL_18_STABLE fails, reporting the same complaint about struct
PartitionPruneState as crake and baza are. So that's good.

* REL_17_STABLE passes, or at least it reports success exit
and the log file avers "no abi diffs found in this run".
However, I'm running it manually with --force --verbose,
and the verbose output says
...
tester:REL_17_STABLE [18:41:30] ABICompCheck :: doing comparison against baseline 0405dcf7c6b1162dd1e4377d1862aa0a38629e6b
tester:REL_17_STABLE [18:41:32] ABICompCheck :: FAILURE - postgres, Exit Status - 139, Input Path - ./inst/bin/postgres, Version: REL_17_STABLE
tester:REL_17_STABLE [18:41:33] running make ecpg check ...
tester:REL_17_STABLE [18:41:38] OK

So apparently the ABICompCheck module isn't quite compatible
with this usage. But it seems close enough, if anyone with
an up-to-date FreeBSD BF animal wants to spin it up.

Sadly, doesn't look like anyone's ported libabigail to NetBSD
yet, or I'd try to get it going on mamba. Don't have quite
enough ambition to install it from source.

regards, tom lane