Introduction
The abipkgdiff program compares the ABI of ELF binaries carried by two versions of a given package. It then emits a textual report that precisely describes the changes that potentially make the ELF binaries ABI incompatible. Note that abipkgdiff analyzes the ABI of the binaries by essentially looking at the debug information accompanying the ELF binaries.
Requirements
It is assumed that you already have a development environment setup which can build packages. Other than that all that is required is the package libabigail.
$ sudo yum install libabigail (or as root) # yum install libabigail
Procedure
The abipkgdiff program compares the ABIs of ELF binaries contained in two versions of a given package P. Let's call P1.rpm and P2.rpm the former and later version of packageP. Please note that abipkgdiff needs the debug information packages of P1 and P2 in order to operate. Let's call these debug info packages P1-debuginfo.rpm and P2-debuginfo.rpm You need to have them available locally, just as you do for P1.rpm and P2.rpm
Comparing
To compare the ABIs of P1 and P2 here is the command line:
abipkgdiff --d1 P1-debuginfo.rpm --d2 P2-debuginfo.rpm P1.rpm P2.rpm
A report with details of the ABI changes is emitted on the standard output of the command line.