Hi, At the recent DPDK 2017 Userspace in Dublin we had a discussion about API/ABI stability with representation from Intel, OVS-DPDK, Debian, Red Hat and plenty of input from the floor.
The main consensus after looking at different proposals was to maintain the current process (http://dpdk.org/doc/guides/contributing/versioning.html) but to try enforce it more rigidly. The main points to come out of this discussion were: 1. That 3 Acks are still needed for deprecation and they should come from different companies. 2. ABI checks to be run as part of the CI/testing so that patches that break ABI are flagged early. Note, ABI checks can be run manually as follows: http://dpdk.org/doc/guides/contributing/versioning.html#running-the-abi-validator 3. New API's will be marked as experimental by default for 1 release minimum. This is to address the most common case for breakage which is in new APIs. If I missed, or misrepresented, anything please update in a reply. John
