Re: Alternate SONAME values

[Ganesan Rajagopal]

>>>>> "Keith" == Keith Packard <address@hidden> writes:

> No, I haven't. I have little experience with these systems, so I don't
> even know if this scheme will work. Hence my question to this list where
> I imagine there are people with experience on those systems. The key
> question is whether the system uses SONAMES or filenames to locate
> libraries.

Even if they do use file names to locate libraries, can't you continue to
additionaly ship filenames matching the SONAMES? I mean having a symlink
libXaw.so.6.0.0 -> libXaw6.so.6.0.0.

In fact, thinking further about the scenario you presented with version-less
file names:

=======
Version 6 Xaw   -> libXaw.so.6.0.1, libXaw.so.6 
Version 7 Xaw   -> libXaw.so.7.0.0, libXaw.so.7 
Version 8 Xaw   -> libXaw.so.8.0.0, libXaw.so.8, libXaw.so 
=======

Can't you just manually create and ship versioned .so file names? Like

=======
Version 6 Xaw   -> libXaw.so.6.0.1, libXaw.so.6, libXaw6.so
Version 7 Xaw   -> libXaw.so.7.0.0, libXaw.so.7, libXaw7.so 
Version 8 Xaw   -> libXaw.so.8.0.0, libXaw.so.8, libXaw8.so, libXaw.so
=======

You need to create libXaw6.so -> libXaw.so.6 links manually after
libtool. This seems to be a simpler approach to tweaking the SONAMEs that
libtool generates. Of course, I might still be missing something here, so
I'll stop with this mail :-).

> And, of course, we actively discourage anyone from using any version of
> Xaw; it's a terrible library.

Then why make this any easier ;-). What's wrong with the current scheme of
not shipping .so symlinks with the library but shipping them in a -dev
package, one for each library major version? The -dev packages do conflict
with each other. This already makes it possible, if not easy, to link to
older libraries for some one who really cares.

Ganesan

-- 
Ganesan Rajagopal (rganesan at debian.org) | GPG Key: 1024D/5D8C12EA
Web: http://employees.org/~rganesan        | http://rganesan.blogspot.com