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docs: Add section on ABI versioning and symbol management to CONTRIBUTING.

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Signed-off-by: Praneeth Sarode <praneethsarode@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Anderson Toshiyuki Sasaki <ansasaki@redhat.com>
Reviewed-by: Andreas Schneider <asn@cryptomilk.org>
Reviewed-by: Jakub Jelen <jjelen@redhat.com>
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Praneeth Sarode
2025-02-07 14:18:40 +05:30
committed by Jakub Jelen
parent 9613e9508d
commit d9da8f212d
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CONTRIBUTING.md
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@@ -517,6 +517,37 @@ Bad example:
break; break;
} }
## ABI Versioning and Symbol Management
To maintain [ABI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_binary_interface) stability
and ensure backward compatibility, libssh uses **symbol versioning** to track and manage
exported functions and variables. This allows libssh to introduce new symbols or modify
existing functions in an ABI-compatible way.
When introducing a new symbol:
1. Use the `LIBSSH_API` macro to mark the symbol as part of the public API.
2. If you have [abimap](https://github.com/ansasaki/abimap) installed, the new symbols are
automatically generated in the `src/libssh_dev.map` file in the **build** directory and used automatically for building the updated library. But, depending on the version of `abimap` under use, you may face linker errors like: `unable to find version dependency LIBSSH_4_9_0`. In this case, you need to manually replace the existing `src/libssh.map` file with the generated `libssh_dev.map` file to update the symbol versioning.
3. If you do not have abimap installed, the modified/added symbols must manually be added to the
`src/libssh.map` file. The symbols must be added in the following format (assuming that 4_10_0 is the latest released version):
```
LIBSSH_AFTER_4_10_0
{
global:
new_function;
new_variable;
} LIBSSH_4_10_0;
```
4. After following either of the above steps, the library can be successfully built and
tested without any linker errors.
5. When submitting the patch, make sure that any new symbols have been added to `libssh.map` as described in step 3, so that the new additions may not be excluded from the next release due to human error.
Also, to maintain ABI compatibility, existing symbols must not be removed. Instead, they can
be marked as deprecated using the `LIBSSH_DEPRECATED` macro. This allows the symbol to be
removed in a future release without breaking the ABI.
Have fun and happy libssh hacking! Have fun and happy libssh hacking!