Re: Migrating existing libraries to libtool

[Keith Packard]

Around 2 o'clock on Feb 18, Simon Richter wrote:

> To remain binary compatible, it suffices to have the same major version,
> as programs are expected to link against the .so.<major> file. Which
> file this actually symlinks to is irrelevant. So in fact you start off
> using -version-info <major>:0:0 and then go on as in the libtool
> manual.

No, that will give minor version 0 which would be seen as *older* than the 
previous version of the library.  I really need major and minor versions 
to match so I can build replacement versions with the new tools that match 
precisely with what's already installed.

> Hrm, how is that solved currently with imake?

Imake has all of the necessary system-dependent mechanisms to generate 
correct link commands given the desired major and minor version numbers.
It doesn't modify the version numbers provided, it simply uses whatever 
pieces are appropriate and ignores the low order values.  This has worked 
for some time now and developers have become comfortable with the 
kind of version checking and compatibility issues related to the set of 
platforms this is deployed on.

I've tried to use automake for existing X libraries and eventually had to
give up and fall back to autoconf as libtool was unable to preserve the
correct major and minor versions on even Linux and BSD.  I'd rather not be
forced to support yet another krufty set of build kludges for X just
because libtool has different ideas on library versioning schemes than
we've been using for X.  automake is so close to working, let's close the
gap and let imake die a well deserved death (with apologies to Todd
Brunhoff)

-keith