Re: Thoughts on osabi

[Rob Whitlock <rwhitlock22%gmail.com@localhost>]

> On Jun 2, 2026, at 2:06 AM, Benny Siegert <bsiegert%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:
> 
> 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

IIUC, packages built for 10.0 can run on 10.2 but packages built on
10.2 might not run on 10.0. So we couldn’t just equate 10.0 and 10.2.