Re: libgailutil.so.16 -> libgailutil.so.17

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Sander Vesik <Sander Vesik Sun COM> writes:

> On 26 Jul 2002, jacob berkman wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, 2002-07-26 at 14:15, Bill Haneman wrote:
> > >
> > > it's also true that
> > > backwards-compatible changes will be happening in various libraries, and
> > > in such cases we should bump the soname also, even though bincompat
> > > (backwards, not forwards) is maintained.
> > 
> > either i am confused, or you are.
> > 
> > why would you change the soname for bin compat changes?
> > 
> 
> It is very reasonable (or rather, it woud be pretty unreasonable not to)
> do this if there werer new API additions. Its a pity that we have just one
> level of versioning, so that an incompatible libgailutil will have to be
> called libgailutil2.so

ELF versioning: 

 libfoo.so.1.0.0  == the filename of the library
 libfoo.so.1      == the soname of the library, what get written into apps
                     that link to it.
 libfoo.so        == symlink used for linking 

Non-ELF systems are sometimes similar, sometimes not, but ELF is what
we really care most about for GNOME.

Libtool hides this under a different scheme, but the end effect should
be:

 - The filename of the library changes with every release
 - You change the soname when you make an incompatible (not backwards
   compatible change) change. For platform libraries, we will *never*
   do this within the GNOME 2 timescale.
 - You change the link name (-lfoo => -lfoo2) only when you want a parallel
   compilation environment.

Regards,
                                        Owen