On Tue, 7 Feb 2012, Lucas De Marchi wrote:
Hopefully your intention is only to illustrate what projects should not do
and not to submit a patch. This libkmod project seems to be less than two
months old and perhaps the developers still have a bit to learn about
library versioning.
Yes. We can always learn. It seems that this is not the case here.
There are other projects releasing like this and no one pointed out to
a reasonable argument against it. That means these arguments are not
valid in our case:
a) It's not what libtool's manual says to do
b) In other architectures major number is not always c - a.
That's because libkmod (like in other projects that do the same
release scheme) we are very tied to Linux, and being portable is not a
concern.
Ok.
While libtool does compute the name to apply to the library (using ELF
rules), build-time (ld) and run-time (ld.so) linking is done via standard
system tools and so they determine how the naming gets used.
No, quite the opposite. It doesn't follow libtool's manual, but it
does follow "ELF rules", ld and ld.so. On a API and ABI break the
soname is bumped according to libtool rules. And it doesn't matter if
it goes from libkmod.so.1 to libkmod.so.151 or if it goes to
libkmod.so.2. soname was bumped. major was bumped. Skipping all the
numbers between the majors seems like craziness.
Numbers are free. Only people who build the software or binary
packages ever really see the numbers (if they care to look).
ELF is where the rules come from, not libtool. Libtool tries to make it
easy to follow the ELF rules while working as best as possible with other
schemes.
As far as I understand, we are following "ELF rules". We are just not
following what libtool manual says.
Ok.
It seems that your project's unusual behaviour has brought unwanted
attention to it from a highly-regarded and quite prolific Linux
software developer (Jan Engelhardt). Your project seems quite useful
so it may be wise to keep up appearances (in spite of the annoyance)
so that Linux distributions don't question if they should depend on
it.
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
