ABI questions

[Julien Cristau]

On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 11:18:50 -0400, Trevor Woerner wrote:

> Thanks so much, Peter, for taking the time to reply. The following is
> what I've tried to understand from poking around. I'd appreciate any
> clarifications if I'm off-track:
> 
> From what I can tell, there are 5 ABI's which are important to the
> code, which are found in xserver/hw/xfree86/common/xf86Module.h:
> - ABI_CLASS_ANSIC
> - ..._VIDEODRV
> - ..._XINPUT
> - ..._EXTENSION
> - ..._FONT
> 
> From the poking around I've done, the ABI_CLASS_XINPUT ABI appears to
> be defined in the file xserver/hw/xfree86/common/xf86Xinput.h, but is
> that the only place it's defined? Is there a list somewhere saying:
> "here are the files/functions/identifiers which define ABI X"? If not,
> would that be useful?
> 
It's not the only place it's defined.  The input ABI is basically
'whatever is exported by the server and used by at least one input
driver', AFAIK.

> Has anyone attempted to track which releases contain which ABI
> versions? If not, would that be useful?
> 
There's http://www.x.org/wiki/XorgModuleABIVersions

> Grepping through the code there are many instances throughout driver/*
> where the version of the XINPUT ABI is checked. But there aren't any
> instances of any code checking the version of the EXTENSION ABI.
> Shouldn't there be lots of such checks throughout the extension
> libraries? Especially the older ones?
> 
The extension modules shipped by xorg are all within the server tree, so
there's nowhere to put these checks...

Cheers,
Julien