Re: fun with libgal
On Thu, Jan 24, 2002 at 09:47:36AM -0600, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 24, 2002 at 04:29:02PM +0100, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> > On Thu, 24 Jan 2002, Colin Watson wrote:
> > > If recompiling with a newer version of libgal causes an incompatibility
> > > in libgtkhtml20 (I don't know whether it does or not), then its soname
> >
> > The soname is given by upstream...
>
> Correct. Thus, if the library's version of libgal affects its binary
> compatibility, the upstream maintainer of the library must pick a known
> version of libgal for each library soname.
>
> This is a fairly well-known problem with inter-library linkage in
> general.
Yes, it's a fairly well known problem.
But what you describe is *not* how it is usually solved. In fact,
it's not usually solved at all. It is usually left broken.
In theory, every library should incorporate into its soname, to some
degree, the sonames of every single library it depends upon. In
practice, we don't do this. In the thick web of library dependencies
of (for example) gnome, we could easily end up with a dozen different
sonames of libfoo20, with various permutations of version of other
things it might be linked to.
Which we don't do.
I'm certainly interested to hear workable schemes we could use to fix
this problem, though.
Jules
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