[asterisk-dev] AST_BUILDOPT_SUM stability

[Tilghman Lesher]

On Sun, Dec 2, 2012 at 2:55 AM, Tzafrir Cohen <tzafrir.cohen at xorcom.com> wrote:
> Rcently a number of Debian bugs were fild that some packages of
> external asterisk modules (asterisk-espeak and asterisk-flite) fail to
> load with current Asterisk package.
>
> http://bugs.debian.org/694805 was filed asking to make the ABI
> requirements "<version> rather than <major> ("1.8.13.1~dfsg-2" rather
> than "1.8").
>
> In a followup I noted that I'm not exactly sure if the module load
> failures hav anything to do with ABI stability:
>
>   http://bugs.debian.org/694805#21
>
> As you can see, AST_BUILDOPT_SUM seems to change rather due to changes
> in the module selection, and unrelated to the actual ABI. Or that's how
> I understand it.
>
> What exactly is it intended to guarantee? Apart from saving the existing
> checksum in version control and breaking the build when it changes, what
> better ways are there to prevent the checksum from changing?

One way you could fix this in Debian, since you have potentially
better methods of assuring that ABI skew does not occur, is simply to
set the embedded build string for the loadable modules to the empty
string.  The loader intentionally allows such modules to load.  I
believe this is how the Digium binary-only modules avoid this
particular problem.

-Tilghman