On Fri, 26 Nov 2010 07:06:12 +1100 Lex Trotman elextr@gmail.com wrote:
On 26 November 2010 04:07, Nick Treleaven nick.treleaven@btinternet.com wrote:
On Thu, 25 Nov 2010 10:54:07 +1100 Lex Trotman elextr@gmail.com wrote:
On 24 November 2010 23:54, Nick Treleaven nick.treleaven@btinternet.com wrote:
On Tue, 23 Nov 2010 09:09:59 +1100 Lex Trotman elextr@gmail.com wrote:
But the general consensus seems to be that people are happy to use static versioning and to keep conpiling (well it is the developer list) and either manually checking what has changed in an API/ABI break or (more probably) to hope that C's leaky type system catches any problem.
ABI checking is automatic, not manual (assuming the PLUGIN_VERSION_CHECK() macro is used and not manually implemented wrongly).
What I meant was that if the version fails, my guess is that most plugin devs just bump the version in their plugin and recompile and hope that the compiler catches any incompatible changes. Only the really conscientious ones will check which functions changed and if it affects their code.
No, plugins should not have any ABI number constant in their source. See the source for PLUGIN_VERSION_CHECK().
That checks that the version of geany loading the plugin matches the version the plugin was compiled with. It doesn't check that the recompiled plugin works with the new ABI which is what I'm talking about. Only the compiler (if you are lucky) or manual checks can do that.
When we break the ABI we try to do it so the compiler would catch any problems - usually we would remove the old field name or function name.
(Plugin devs don't need to bump anything when the ABI changes.)
Don't you use:
#if GEANY_ABI_VERSION != xxx /* or whatever conditions */ #error ABI mismatch #endif
for compile time check??
There is no need to try to do that if plugins use the PLUGIN_VERSION_CHECK macro (which all should), and xxx would need to be read from Geany anyway, so that can't be done with the preprocessor.
PLUGIN_VERSION_CHECK is a runtime check, this is a compile time check
GEANY_ABI_VERSION and GEANY_API_VERSION *are* read from Geany, they
are in plugindata.h and as noted above there isn't a runtime way of reading them. The xxx is the version the plugin uses and has to be a constant in the source.
- GEANY_VERSION_CHECK requires GEANY_ABI_VERSION match what it was
compiled with, it can't check that its a version the plugin can use or refuse to compile if it isn't.
I think it's too complicated to have a plugin compatible with 2 or more ABIs. It's asking for trouble.
Nick