Re: [fluid-dev] SONAME Bump?

[Pedro Lopez-Cabanillas]

On Saturday 06 August 2011, Andrew Suffield wrote:
> On Sat, Aug 06, 2011 at 10:00:21PM +1000, Matt Giuca wrote:
> > - Release FluidSynth 2.0, with soname libfluidsynth.so.2, or
> 
> It is generally unwise to attempt to keep SONAME versions and project
> versions in sync. This leads to confusion and inappropriate
> compatibility problems. Best practice is to keep them entirely
> separate.
> 
> The exception is projects which make no attempt to provide any kind of
> stable ABI, for whatever reason (usually: code changing too fast,
> developers can't be bothered). Those have exactly one SONAME per
> version of the code, and client applications must be rebuilt with
> every code change to the library.

IMO the libtool numbering scheme is an unnecessary mystification, to say the 
least.

KDE4 provides a pretty stable ABI, and does not need to use libtool. Qt has 
always managed to provide strongly  stable ABIs within major releases, without 
using libtool either.

Qt4 libraries, as a nice example, keep in sync the SONAME with the shared 
object name and the project version.

Regards,
Pedro