Re: Backwards compatibility issues with GDK 2.4

[Mike Hearn <mike navi cx>]

On Thu, 2004-04-22 at 11:00 -0400, Owen Taylor wrote:
> And of course, it also breaks if symbol versioning is used in GTK+
> or any underlying library.

If you mean GNU-style symbol versioning as opposed to custom #define
based mangling, it's possible to choose which versions your binary uses
using some simple macros.

GNU style symvers as used in glibc are sort of broken anyway, because
the default is to always use the latest version. It's assumed that users
will always use binaries and the developer will test the binaries before
distribution to ensure there are no bugs caused by subtle breaks in the
semantics of functions, so it's known ahead of time which versions (and
therfore behaviours) will be used. 

In practice of course most people compile from source, so can end up
getting any random version: there's no way to (a) know what the
differences between the versions are and (b) the way you select the
specific version to choose is buried so deep inside the GNU info manuals
almost nobody knows about it.

thanks -mike