Re: Dependency libraries and ABI

[Alex Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On 27 Feb 2002, Mike Kestner wrote:

> On Wed, 2002-02-27 at 11:32, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> > That is, if a program is linked to the shared libraries
> > 
> >  libgtk-x11-2.0.so.0
> 
> >    This means that libgtk-2.0.so.0 
> 
> I wish it were the latter...
> 
> Is there a technical reason why the platform name needs to be mangled
> into the so target for gtk and gdk?  glib, pango, and atk all seem to
> have been able to avoid this.  From a Gtk# perspective, the mono runtime
> deals with simple transformations like s/dll/so, but having the library
> base name vary across platforms complicates function access for me.  
> 
> If there's no technical reason for the difference, I'd love to see it go
> away as we switch to the -2.0 names.

There is a technical reason. You may want several backends installed at 
the same time. E.g. The X11 backend and the framebuffer backend.

/ Alex