Re: ABI Compatibility (was Re: Installation woes for the average user...)

[Richard Frith-Macdonald]

On 20 May 2009, at 10:34, David Chisnall wrote:

> On 17 Mar 2009, at 10:28, Yavor Doganov wrote:
>
> > This is probably worth having in the (very) distant future, but has
> > little to do with the question at hand.  My objection was that it's
> > absolutely useless to bump the soname 1.14 -> 1.15 -> 1.16 (just an
> > example) when there are only compatible bugfixes and API
> > additions.  How you version the releases and what is considered
> > "stable" and "unstable" is completely orthogonal to the library
> > versioning.
>
> This was the last post on this subject, but apparently the point was  
> not absorbed by anyone.  Why did the library version number bump  
> when I updated GNUstep?  This left all of my apps and frameworks  
> linked to the old version (which, because the new version had a  
> different name, wasn't overwritten) even though the ABI was  
> compatible.  Let me repeat that:
>
> This policy caused every framework and every application to require  
> recompiling (well, technically only relinking, but good luck  
> persuading GNUstep make to do that) FOR NO REASON.
>
> This is exactly the kind of thing that makes distributions reluctant  
> to ship up-to-date GNUstep.  Please, please, please, stop it.  The  
> soname should only be bumped when the ABI changes in an incompatible  
> way.

I think what you are describing (as the correct way to do things) is  
what GNUstep already tries to do ... see http://mediawiki.gnustep.org/index.php/GNUstep_release_policy 
 for the actual release policy details.

While this:

> > How you version the releases and what is considered
> > "stable" and "unstable" is completely orthogonal to the library
> > versioning.

is technically true, it's not what people expect in practice, and  
therefor not policy.  The policy is to keep the main so version  
numbers in sync with the main release version numbers, because that  
matches normal expectations.

However, I don't think there have been any recent releases which  
should have changed the so number for any of the libraries.