Keeping binary compatibility

[Adriaan de Groot]

On Monday, October 04, 2010 10:15:18 am Ivan ?uki? wrote:
> > these rules on the techbase and use tools that detect BIC issues. Can't
> > we integrated the abi-compliance-checker with krazy and send mails to
> > the maintainers of those libs whenever a BIC change is detected?

There's a tremendous list of things that can, could and should be integrated 
with krazy / EBN. The issue is time, really. Bertjan and Allen are really 
busy, and I'm trying to land contract jobs (of which "add BIC checking to 
krazy" could be one). While the krazy code lives in KDE SVN, it does need some 
massaging to run nicely on the server, and presenting the information nicely 
is sometimes an issue.

Someone mentioned emailing committers when problems occur. There's a technical 
and a social problem with that solution:

- krazy runs take hours to process all of KDE; better parallelization might 
help here, but in general we're producing code faster than it can be checked. 
I suppose that *if* a BIC problem is found, that we could binary-search for 
it, but that's another level of complexity to add. In other words, finding out 
who to mail is a problem.

- way early in the design we decided that emailing people was not the right 
way to go. Email quickly becomes suffocating, and if there's too many 
notifications from the system, then people  will start to ignore them. You also 
have the ancilliary problem of whom to notify (-devel mailing list or author?) 
and how often to send out reminders. Again, it's something that could be a 
really fancy addition to identity.kde.org and krazy, but is out of scope for 
the current design and, IMO, counter-productive.


[ade]