[cmake-developers] Integrate API/ABI checker to the CMake

[Alexander Neundorf]

On Friday 07 October 2011, Andrey Ponomarenko wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have an idea to improve the CMake build system by integrating with the
> abi-compliance-checker [1] tool. It's a tool for checking for API/ABI
> backward compatibility of C/C++ libraries. In the Java world there is an
> alternative tool called Clirr, which is already integrated to the Ant
> and Maven build systems as a plug-in. But there is no such thing in the
> C/C++ world yet. So, people have to create custom scripts (phonon/cmake
> [2], mysql++/make [3], ...) to integrate the abi-compliance-checker tool
> into the build system.
> 
> It would be great if CMake users could be able to check API/ABI changes
> using two easy built-in CMake commands: "make abidump" and "make
> abicheck", without the need to understand how the abi-compliance-checker
> tool works. The first command ("make abidump") should create a snapshot
> of a "stable" library ABI, which will be compared with the next releases
> by the second command ("make abicheck"):
> 
> "make abidump": abi-compliance-checker --lib=name --dump=v1.xml
> --dump-path=snapshot-v1.abi.tar.gz
> "make abicheck": abi-compliance-checker --lib=name
> --d1=snapshot-v1.abi.tar.gz --d2=v2.xml
> 
> v1.xml and v2.xml are XML-descriptors of old (snapshot) and new
> (current) versions of a library(ies):
> 
> <version>
>      1.0
> </version>
> 
> <headers>
> /directory/with/headers/
> </headers>
> 
> <libs>
> /directory/with/libraries/
> </libs>
> 
> I'm not familiar with the CMake internals and cannot implement this
> feature by myself. It would be great if some experts in CMake could
> write it. Considering the great number of C/C++ libraries using CMake,
> this feature should make upstream development of C/C++ libraries more
> stable.

Maybe you don't have to be familiar with CMake internals to do this.
It may be that this can be done simply in cmake script, but putting some 
macros or functions into a CMakeABICheck.cmake file or something like this.

Did you try to use add_custom_target() to exeucte the described steps ?

Alex