Re: Some bugs in Gnome 0.99.0

["Gary V. Vaughan" <gvaughan oranda demon co uk>]

Pavel Polischouk wrote:
> 
> 1. Versioning of dynamic libraries
> 
> Version numbers of .so in gnome-libs, ORBit and others seem to be out of
> sync with package versions. libgnome.so.0.30.0 seems inappropriate for
> gnome-libs-0.99.0-1.*.rpm. I've made patches to some of the libraries,
> but since they use different techniques to provide parameters to
> libtool, I gave up. I've submitted this along with patches to
> GNOME bugzilla.

It is correct for library versions to be different from package
versions.  After all the two things are entirely different.  The package
version is used by the developers to track the chronology of the
releases, and perhaps whether major or minor changes have happened in
*the functionality*.  The library version is used by the dynamic linker
(i.e. by the OS) to track *binary compatibility* between releases of an
individual shared library.  With libtool generated libraries, for
example, the version numbers are used to tell the linker, at run time,
whether it can safely load a newer library version in preference to the
library the application was compiled with (presumably the old interface
must have been maintained, some bugs have been fixed, and maybe some new
features which don't break the previous API are present).

It is plain wrong to try to force the package version number into the
library version number (despite what raster might tell you =)O|).

Cheers,
	Gary V. Vaughan