Re: Thoughts on osabi

[Benny Siegert <bsiegert%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Sun, 31 May 2026, David H. Gutteridge wrote:

> It's a little more complicated. Stable major branches are not supposed
> to break ABI compatibility, which is why you see 10.0 and 10.1 (for
> example) getting the same binary packages. However, unstable releases
> can deliberately break ABI compatibility (within x.99.x iterations).

What if we evolve osabi to take these rules into account? That is, for 
NetBSD _only_, do the following:

- osabi built on any 10.x release (from 10.0_RC1 to 10.2_STABLE, etc.) 
just becomes "10".
- For a 10.99.x release, we continue recording the entire version number.
- pkg_install would use the same rules to CHECK_OSABI

I can understand a desire to avoid special cases, but this is the native 
packaging system for NetBSD, so we can be aware of the special rules for 
NetBSD versioning.

Any comments or objections?

--
Benny