RFC: remove qt-copy

[Thiago Macieira]

Philippe Fremy wrote:
>Hi,
>
>Thiago Macieira wrote:
>> (BTW, one of the Qt3 patches was binary-incompatible and was shipped
>> by all distros -- probably still is)
>
>Tell me if I am saying something stupid, but after dealing with the
>problem of BIC for years, isn't there an automated tool that can check
>binary compatibility between two releases and shout big times if it's
>not the case ? On a daily basis ?

No.

That tool could be written with Roberto's C++ parser. We have one test in 
the Qt tree (tests/auto/bic) that works by asking g++ to dump the class 
tree, then doing some checks. But that obviously only catches Unix/X11 
code, not other platforms.

And even then, it doesn't catch everything. There's another test 
(tests/auto/symbols) that tries to help there too, but it has a lot of 
false positives. And it excludes QtWebKit completely, because that lib 
leaks too much.

Not to mention, of course, that this relies on the g++ ABI. Other 
compilers have different ABIs and a breakage there may not appear in g++ 
symbol names and class dump. (like removing the first "const" from "const 
char at(i) const" in QByteArray)

For every Qt minor release, we do manual header checks (i.e., read the 
diff): that's the only sure way to catch those mistakes.

-- 
  Thiago Macieira  -  thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
    PGP/GPG: 0x6EF45358; fingerprint:
    E067 918B B660 DBD1 105C  966C 33F5 F005 6EF4 5358
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part.
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-core-devel/attachments/20090527/110d302c/attachment.sig>