From 2843cdd93a495328182825035d524c9854015c32 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Neil Horman Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2018 20:48:07 -0500 Subject: [PATCH] doc: add ABI experimental tag in versioning guide Document the need to add the __experimental tag to appropriate functions Signed-off-by: Neil Horman Acked-by: John McNamara Acked-by: Thomas Monjalon --- doc/guides/contributing/versioning.rst | 16 ++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 16 insertions(+) diff --git a/doc/guides/contributing/versioning.rst b/doc/guides/contributing/versioning.rst index 4000906289..c495294db8 100644 --- a/doc/guides/contributing/versioning.rst +++ b/doc/guides/contributing/versioning.rst @@ -50,6 +50,22 @@ those new APIs and start finding issues with them, new DPDK APIs will be automatically marked as ``experimental`` to allow for a period of stabilization before they become part of a tracked ABI. +Note that marking an API as experimental is a multi step process. +To mark an API as experimental, the symbols which are desired to be exported +must be placed in an EXPERIMENTAL version block in the corresponding libraries' +version map script. +Secondly, the corresponding definitions of those exported functions, and +their forward declarations (in the development header files), must be marked +with the ``__rte_experimental`` tag (see ``rte_compat.h``). +The DPDK build makefiles perform a check to ensure that the map file and the +C code reflect the same list of symbols. +This check can be circumvented by defining ``ALLOW_EXPERIMENTAL_API`` +during compilation in the corresponding library Makefile. + +In addition to tagging the code with ``__rte_experimental``, +the doxygen markup must also contain the EXPERIMENTAL string, +and the MAINTAINERS file should note the EXPERIMENTAL libraries. + ABI versions, once released, are available until such time as their deprecation has been noted in the Release Notes for at least one major release cycle. For example consider the case where the ABI for DPDK 2.0 has been -- 2.20.1