On Fri, Mar 20, 1998 at 04:28:23PM -0800, Chris G. Demetriou wrote:
> I think the requirement that backward compatiblity bits work For All
> Time is a very bad one.  It means that the libraries _must_ become
> bloated, over time, and it means added work if interfaces change
> (change the interface and change all backward compatibility bits all
> the way back to the beginning of time).
> 
> 
> I'm not at all convinced that getting rid of the notion of shared
> library major numbers is at all a good thing...

I'm sure that everyone agrees that trying to support all versions of
the ABI over the last century would be a bad thing. But it would sure
improve the situation where you're cutting a new release and want to
support the previous releases, while there has been an ABI change.

Bumping the major libnumber turns out to be messy, as we found out
just before 1.3. The renaming hack isn't too pretty, and it breaks
things too (PR which says that cc -traditional stops working).
You can say that you can solve these problems by providing library
compat packages, but that's really just moving the bloat out to
another file; you'd need these packages pretty much all the
time, unless you're doing a clean install.

I'd love to see some (transparent) function versioning scheme.
To avoid the libraries from being bloated you can still stick
to some library versioning scheme, but it would just have to be
different from the current one.

- Frank