Re: The case of libkmod's .so versioning attempts, and induced collisions

[Bob Friesenhahn]

On Tue, 7 Feb 2012, Jan Engelhardt wrote:

> Much to my disappointment, I found that the newly-released libkmod v5
> has made the following non-trivial change to its source tree, the latter
> of which I want to bring to attention:
[stuff removed]
> (The numbers are directly fed into libtool's -version-info argument.) As
> you can see, the CURRENT number was decreased, which, according to
> common libtool sense, is not something that one should normally do. Why
> do I care? Well, I happen to be active in toying with system tools
> (especially the ones I have to use sooner or later), as well as distro
> packaging, with a preference to get things right.
>
> Unfortunately, I was unable to convince the kmod people of this fact.
> Kay Sievers and Lucas De Marchi's argumentation is that (a) kmod is
> linux-only and (b) there has 'never been a libkmod.so.2' before, or even
> something about (c) not caring about GNU/"the mess that libtool is".

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.

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.

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.

Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
address@hidden, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer,    http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/