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

[Bob Friesenhahn <bfriesen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 7 Feb 2012, Lucas De Marchi wrote:

> > 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.
>
> Yes. We can always learn. It seems that this is not the case here.
> There are other projects releasing like this and no one pointed out to
> a reasonable argument against it. That means these arguments are not
> valid in our case:
>
> a) It's not what libtool's manual says to do
> b) In other architectures major number is not always c - a.
>
> That's because libkmod (like in other projects that do the same
> release scheme) we are very tied to Linux, and being portable is not a
> concern.

Ok.

> > 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.
>
> No, quite the opposite. It doesn't follow libtool's manual, but it
> does follow "ELF rules", ld and ld.so. On a API and ABI break the
> soname is bumped according to libtool rules. And it doesn't matter if
> it goes from libkmod.so.1 to libkmod.so.151 or if it goes to
> libkmod.so.2. soname was bumped. major was bumped. Skipping all the
> numbers between the majors seems like craziness.

Numbers are free.  Only people who build the software or binary 
packages ever really see the numbers (if they care to look).

> > 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.
>
> As far as I understand, we are following "ELF rules". We are just not
> following what libtool manual says.

Ok.

It seems that your project's unusual behaviour has brought unwanted 
attention to it from a highly-regarded and quite prolific Linux 
software developer (Jan Engelhardt).  Your project seems quite useful 
so it may be wise to keep up appearances (in spite of the annoyance) 
so that Linux distributions don't question if they should depend on 
it.

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