2004.07.11 18:05 "Re: [Tiff] unintentional ABI change between 3.5 and 3.6?", by Bob Friesenhahn

Unfortunately, it is incompatible with the previous libtiff policy, where the soname was release dependent. We can use the right approach after the major changes in tha library (switching to TIFF64), but for 3.7.0 I have used the -version-number libtool switch to generate a soname --- that is compatible with the libtiff binaries, compiled from old sources.

This seems risky to me. The current CVS code base includes API/ABI changes from the previous libtiff. Some of the basic types have been changed (e.g. the offset type) to a different size.

There is already the situation that if someone installs the library under FreeBSD using the official source package that they will no longer be able to log in to their GNOME or KDE desktop. Users that can't log in anymore are not happy. :-(

In my opinion, the previous libtiff policy was flat-out wrong.

Bob

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