[dpdk-dev] ABI/API stability in DPDK

[Mcnamara, John]

Hi,

At the recent DPDK 2017 Userspace in Dublin we had a discussion about API/ABI stability with representation from Intel, OVS-DPDK, Debian, Red Hat and plenty of input from the floor.


The main consensus after looking at different proposals was to maintain the current process (http://dpdk.org/doc/guides/contributing/versioning.html) but to try enforce it more rigidly.





The main points to come out of this discussion were:



1. That 3 Acks are still needed for deprecation and they should come from different companies.



2. ABI checks to be run as part of the CI/testing so that patches that break ABI are flagged early. Note, ABI checks can be run manually as follows: http://dpdk.org/doc/guides/contributing/versioning.html#running-the-abi-validator



3. New API's will be marked as experimental by default for 1 release minimum. This is to address the most common case for breakage which is in new APIs.


If I missed, or misrepresented, anything please update in a reply.

John