2004.07.10 17:56 "[Tiff] unintentional ABI change between 3.5 and 3.6?", by Jay Berkenbilt

2004.07.11 14:27 "Re: [Tiff] unintentional ABI change between 3.5 and 3.6?", by Bob Friesenhahn

My other reaction to this is that I didn't realize the soname was actually tied to the library version. My understanding was the libtool/shared library versions are generally now not tied directly to the public versions of libraries but instead are otherwise meaningless numbers updated whenever needed. This is the whole -version-info stuff for libtool, right? Perhaps we haven't been doing it that way for libtiff and should. That is, I think the sonames should be decoupled from the published release numbers.

Right. Libtool's versioning rules should be strictly followed. The numbering on the shared library should not be based on the release version.

There is a problem with FreeBSD since for some reason (probably to deal with some past incompatiblity) its libtiff.so uses a .4 extension rather than .3. Installing libtiff from the official libtiff distribution package renders lots of installed software unusable. There are likely other such cases. I encourage libtiff to study existing library version usage and consider this when establishing the base version for the configure-based release. Skipping ahead a couple of base version numbers is likely a wise idea in order to avoid destroying existing installs and to ensure that everything works once libtiff starts following library versioning rules.

Bob

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Bob Friesenhahn
bfriesen@simple.dallas.tx.us
http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen