Re: [fluid-dev] SONAME Bump?

[Matt Giuca]

I agree with Andrew's first paragraph (and I don't know enough about
libtool to endorse the second).

> Is it something that alone calls for a new release (1.1.5) or can we just
> update svn? What implications does bumping the SONAME have?

The Fluidsynth soname is currently libfluidsynth.so.1. As far as I
know, it is up to each library to decide whether the soname is the
MAJOR.MINOR or just the MAJOR. The Linux HOWTO on Shared Libraries
(http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Program-Library-HOWTO/shared-libraries.html)
recommends that the soname is just the MAJOR (which is consistent with
FluidSynth).

However it is arranged, you need to bump the soname when binary
compatibility is broken. This would mean that going up to 1.1.5 or
even 1.2 wouldn't work, because the soname would still be
libfluidsynth.so.1. So if you want to change the soname, I think you
have two options:

- Release FluidSynth 2.0, with soname libfluidsynth.so.2, or
- Change the soname policy to MAJOR.MINOR and release FluidSynth 1.2,
with soname libfluidsynth.so.1.2

You should not change the soname policy to MAJOR.MINOR.REVISION,
because otherwise each revision release will be binary-incompatible
with the previous one. (In fact I just talked another project out of
this soname policy yesterday!)

I'm not suggesting you do either of the above things -- I don't think
this warrants a major (or even minor) version release. Since this is
the removal of an undocumented API feature, I would say you are within
your "contract" to do it without changing the soname.