Re: Shared library versioning

[Lasse Collin]

On 2011-06-10 Mike Frysinger wrote:
> iirc, what you're expecting is Linux style on systems which dont use
> Linux style.  so libtool is working correctly as the maintainers of
> those respective OS's intended.  while you might disagree with their
> decisions, it doesnt make the libtool behavior wrong.

I'm expecting Linux style or something close to it, because according to 
the operating systems specific docs that I have read, Linux-like 
versioning *is* the right thing on those operating systems (*BSDs and 
HP-UX). It would make sense that Libtool would try to emulate the native 
behavior. It is not nice that Libtool increments the shared library 
major version when there's no need to do that.

While the following isn't a SunOS manual, it gives an impression that 
even SunOS 4 uses Linux-like versioning without the revision number, 
for example libfoo.so.$major.$minor. See the sections 3.2 and 3.3.1:

    
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/als00/2000papers/papers/full_papers/browndavid/browndavid_html/

It's not clear to me if there is any operating system that requires 
incrementing the major version when a new symbol is added to the library 
while keeping backward compatibility (that is, when you do ++current, 
++age, revision=0). In this situation, Libtool does increment the major 
version on several operating systems, but I wonder if it is possible 
that it has been a misunderstanding when someone read operating system 
specific docs long time ago.

-- 
Lasse Collin  |  IRC: Larhzu @ IRCnet & Freenode