Re: ABI question

[Marko Anastasov <marko marko anastasov name>]

On Fri, 2007-01-05 at 14:22 -0800, Joe Van Dyk wrote:
> On 1/5/07, Jonathon Jongsma <jonathon jongsma gmail com> wrote:
> > On 1/4/07, Joe Van Dyk <joevandyk gmail com> wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > I have gtk-2.4 installed.  What's the latest version of gtkmm that
> > > will work with it?  I tried compiling the latest stable version of
> > > glibmm on the box, but it complained that I didn't have glib-2.9
> > > installed (I have glib2-2.4.7).
> >
> > You can generally compile and install older versions of gtkmm with
> > newer versions of GTK+, but you can't usually compile and install
> > newer versions of gtkmm with older versions of GTK+.  This is because
> > gtkmm wraps and uses newer interfaces that were introduced in newer
> > versions of GTK+, which won't exist if you try to compile against
> > older GTK+ headers.  The same applies to glib and glibmm as well.
> > So to compile a 2.x.y version of gtkmm (or glibmm) you'll probably
> > need to have at least the 2.x.0 version of GTK+ (or glib) installed.
> > So in your case if you don't install new versions of glib/GTK+, the
> > latest version of gtkmm you'll be able to install is probably the last
> > release in the 2.4.x series
> 
> Thanks.  The whole API / ABI / Ubuntu installing 2.8 gtkmm but called
> it 2.4 stuff was confusing me.  I'm using the latest gtkmm 2.4 source
> code and it's working great.

It is generally useful to know the difference between the "soname" and
the "real name" of a library [1]. 2.4 is basically just a number marking
API stability.

Marko

[1] http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Program-Library-HOWTO/shared-libraries.html