[ros-release] What to do about ABI breakage error?

Tully Foote tfoote at osrfoundation.org
Sat May 30 18:23:04 UTC 2015


Hi Jack,

At this point I think the cat is out of the bag. Yes you could rerelease
with that patch rolled back, or you could rerelease with an incremented
minor number as is to indicate the change. However my suggestion would be
to email ros-users and notify them of the ABI change and recommend they
make sure to recompile anything they have built depending on
image_transport when they install the update.

We generally try to stay ABI compatible in our releases but we don't make
guarantees of ABI compatibility. On the buildfarm we painstakingly track
all dependencies and rebuild every downstream package making the assumption
that every release breaks ABI. It is a lot of time and effort to build all
those packages, but until we have ABI versioning we cannot do much better.
(We talked about ABI versioning in the REP 127 discussions but ended up
leaving it out due to not being able to reach a consensus on it
http://www.ros.org/reps/rep-0127.html)

In general my recommendation is to recompile anytime you apt-get upgrade.
Most recompilations should be a no-op if the dependencies have not changed.
If they have changed the rebuild won't have been in vain.

We do a pretty good job at the core of maintaining ABI compatibility
however there are a lot of non-core packages that definitely do not
maintain ABI. And where that line of expected ABI stability not defined.
Since this has caught some users I think notifying everyone of the changes
to help others avoid the same problem.

Tully

On Sat, May 30, 2015 at 8:54 AM, Jack O'Quin via ros-release <
ros-release at lists.ros.org> wrote:

> It appears that the image_common 1.11.5 release broke ABI compatibility
> for the image_transport package.
>
> Unfortunately, it was released to Hydro and Indigo as well as Jade, and
> problems have been reported:
>
>  https://github.com/ros-perception/image_common/issues/34
>
> At this point, I don't know what to do. Backing out those changes would
> presumably create yet more ABI breakage. What kind of recovery is
> recommended?
> --
>  joq
>
> _______________________________________________
> ros-release mailing list
> ros-release at lists.ros.org
> http://lists.ros.org/mailman/listinfo/ros-release
>
>
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