Re: totally confused by versioning system of libtool...

[Bill Northcott]

On 15/05/2005, at 12:55 AM, Peter O'Gorman wrote:
> | How should libtool versioning be used so as to support both the  
> MacOS
> | X/Darwin scheme and the Linux ELF way of doing things?  Is this
> | possible, or should one write specific makefile routines to adjust
> | version numbers at install time?
>
> Mac OS X/darwin support for library versioning in GNU libtool uses  
> a scheme
> that is similar to GNU/linux, it works fine.
I have so far only found one GNU libtool packages which correctly  
versions its libraries on MacOS X.  This is R and they seem to do it  
with code in Makefile.in which overrides the libtool versioning.   
Most libtool libraries either don't set the internal library versions  
at all or just set both current_version and compatibility_version to  
the same string, which is not correct.

As I understand the problem, on Linux an app linked against libfoo  
version 4.5.6 will happily link at run time with version 4.6.2.  On  
Darwin MacOS X it will not work.  As I see it on MacOS X the app  
should have a current_version of 4.5.6 and compatibility version of  
4.0.0.  R is the only package I have seen that does this.

It what sense do you think 'it works fine'?  How does a single  
libtool version string get translated into the two possibly different  
version strings required by MacOS X?
Bill Northcott