> 
>  > Is there any reason we can't simply increment the major version number
>  > of every shared library?  Any new programs that are compiled will find
>  > the new (ELF) library, to match their own ELF formats (because the
>  > compiler will have been changed at that point).  I guess we'll need to
>  > have an a.out ld.so and an ELF ld_elf.so, so that a.out
>  > dynamically-linked binaries can still load the right ld.so.
> 
> This is what Linux did (and FreeBSD, too, I think) and it caused no end
> of trouble.
> 

What trouble?