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Fix some wording in the Libabigail overview manual page

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While reading the overview manual page some things stroke me as
needing some cleanup, especially, the confusion about 'ABIGAIL' the
framework and libabigail the library.

	* doc/manuals/libabigail-overview.rst: Cleanup some confusion
	about Abigail-the-framework and libabigail-the-library.

Signed-off-by: Dodji Seketeli <dodji@redhat.com>
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Dodji Seketeli 2016-05-30 15:26:22 +02:00
parent 7013500ca7
commit d5d303b6c2
1 changed files with 24 additions and 20 deletions
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44
doc/manuals/libabigail-overview.rst
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@ -1,34 +1,36 @@
#######################
Overview of Libabigail
#######################
####################
Overview of the Abigail framework
####################
Libabigail stands for the Application Binary Interface Generic
**ABIGAIL** stands for the Application Binary Interface Generic
Analysis and Instrumentation Library.
It aims at helping developers and software distributors to spot some
ABI-related issues like interface incompatibility in `ELF`_ shared
libraries.
It's a framework which aims at helping developers and software
distributors to spot some ABI-related issues like interface
incompatibility in `ELF`_ shared libraries by performing a static
analysis of the `ELF`_ binaries at hand.
The type of interface incompatibilities that ``libabigail`` focuses on
is related to changes on the exported ELF functions and variables
The type of interface incompatibilities that **Abigail** focuses on is
related to changes on the exported ELF functions and variables
symbols, as well as layout and size changes of data types of the
functions and variables exported by shared libraries.
In other words, if the return type of a function exported by a shared
library changes in an incompatible way from one version of a given
shared library to another, we want ``libabigail`` to help people catch
shared library to another, we want **Abigail** to help people catch
that.
In more concrete terms, ``libabigail`` can parse a shared library in
`ELF`_ format, accompanied with its associated debug information in
`DWARF`_ format, build an internal representation of all the functions
and variables it exports, along with their types. It also builds an
internal representation of the `ELF symbols`_ of these functions and
variables. That information about these exported functions and
variables is roughly what we consider as being the ABI of the shared
library, at least, in the scope of Libabigail.
In more concrete terms, the Abigail framwork provides a shared library
named **libabigail** which exposes an API to parse a shared library in
`ELF`_ format (accompanied with its associated debug information in
`DWARF`_ format) build an internal representation of all the functions
and variables it exports, along with their types. **Libabigail** also
builds an internal representation of the `ELF symbols`_ of these
functions and variables. That information about these exported
functions and variables is roughly what we consider as being the ABI
of the shared library, at least, in the scope of **Libabigail**.
Aside of this internal representation, ``libabigail`` provides
Aside of this internal representation, **libabigail** provides
facilities to perform deep comparisons of two ABIs. That is, it can
compare the types of two sets of functions or variables and represents
the result in a way that allows it to emit textual reports about the
@ -36,7 +38,9 @@ differences.
This allows us to write tools like :doc:`abidiff` that can compare the
ABI of two shared libraries and represent the result in a meaningful
enough way to help us spot ABI incompatibilities.
enough way to help us spot ABI incompatibilities. There are several
:doc:`other tools <libabigail-tools>` that are built using the
``Abigail`` framwork.
.. _ELF: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_and_Linkable_Format
.. _DWARF: http://www.dwarfstd.org