On Wed, Jan 08, 2003 at 01:28:58PM -0500, H. S. Teoh wrote: > Umm... if I were an upstream author, I'd choose the soname based on the > API. Then you're not fit to be an upstream library author, because you don't understand that an ABI can change *as a result of changes you make*, without any corresponding changes to the API. One example of this is changing the size of a data type, which may provide complete source compatibility while completely breaking binary compatibility. Moreover, encoding API information into a binary object (which, being binary, exports only an ABI -- not an API) is worthless. The soname should uniquely identify the ABI, to the extent the ABI is under upstream's control. We *should* have a mechanism for handling ABI incompatibilities beyond upstream's control, but that's not going to be fixed here. -- Steve Langasek postmodern programmer
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