Re: Windows and DLLs

[Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com>]

Christopher Curtis <ccurtis@ee.fit.edu> writes:

> One of the problems people have now is with GTK+ and the GIMP.  The
> problem here is that the GTK people aren't really following the rules. 
> GTK+ version 1.1 should be backwards compatible with GTK+ 1.0 (same major
> version number), but have significant performance increases or new
> widgets.  However, these problems are bound to appear during development
> cycles so it's not wholly "their fault".  On the other hand, they seem to
> be trying to imitate the linux kernel system of odd numbers being
> development and even being stable - this does not work 100% for libraries;
> in that sense, they are doing it wrong and should properly change the next
> higher version number.  Then following that system, though, the scenario
> changes to be that of even numbers (and zero) being development and odd
> numbers being stable.
> 
> Now, I'm not trying to criticize the GTK+ people - just trying to give an
> example of how people are currently having problems and that there is a
> solution that does not require reinventing a library system that has held
> up for the past twenty years.

$ ls /opt/themes/lib/*gtk*so*

 /opt/themes/lib/libgtk.so -> libgtk-1.1.so.2.0.0
 /opt/themes/lib/libgtk-1.1.so.0 -> libgtk-1.1.so.0.0.0
 /opt/themes/lib/libgtk-1.1.so.0.0.0
 /opt/themes/lib/libgtk-1.1.so.1 -> libgtk-1.1.so.1.0.0
 /opt/themes/lib/libgtk-1.1.so.1.0.0
 /opt/themes/lib/libgtk-1.1.so.2 -> libgtk-1.1.so.2.0.0
 /opt/themes/lib/libgtk-1.1.so.2.0.0

$ ldd .libs/testgtk
        libgtk-1.1.so.2 => /opt/themes/lib/libgtk-1.1.so.2 (0x40000000)

$ ldd /usr/local/bin/gimp
        libgtk-1.1.so.1 => /opt/themes/lib/libgtk-1.1.so.1 (0x40005000)
[...]

Hmmm, I seem to have programs that link and run fine against two
different development versions of GTK+. Wonder why.... ;-)

(Yes, we have a scheme, which isn't too different from what 
people normally do, which handles this fine. You are confusing
the version number of the package with the version number
of the library.)

Regards,
                                        Owen

P.S. - I'm not saying that people installing from CVS may not
have had some problems. That's because we've only been increasing
the version numbers when we make tarball releases. We quite
likely should be increasing them every time we break binary
incompatibility, though I'm not sure if people would like
having 15 or 20 versions of libgtk on their harddrive.