package stability

[Bill Nottingham]

Axel Thimm (Axel.Thimm at ATrpms.net) said: 
> On Sat, Mar 03, 2007 at 10:26:01AM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> > Do we want to keep API/ABI stable over the corresponding RHEL release?
> 
> It would be interesting to have a document that described RH's specs
> in this area. E.g. which API/ABI are more important that others. RHEL
> has certainly kept some parts more flexible than others, for example
> wireless API/ABI on almost each kernel update.

It depends on the release, but generally, symbols used by external
modules must be kept fixed. However, various subsystems (libata, wireless)
may change.

With the exception of very specific things (the wireless-tools things
mentioned, which caused its own headaches), the userspace library ABI
is considered pretty much sacrosanct.

Bill