Is there any reason to have library version numbers the same across
   platforms? 

you want to maintain what is now about 25 copies of these values for
each library?  "no fscking way."   actually, it's probably more like
about 10 versions but there's nothing to say that all machine_arch's
need to have the same executable format (they just do currently i
think, but i don't expect all the m68k platforms to be able switch
at exactly the same time (think boot blocks)).

     It sure would have made life easier to live without COMPAT_AOUT if we
   had bumped the major versions on ELF stuff!!!

probably would have saved some hassle for this, yeah.  but there are still
about 4 architectures (at least) to convert to ELF.  besides this transition
period, there is *every* reason to keep the shared library version numbers
the same across all ports.

the shared library version is an indication of its *feature set* and
going from a.out to ELF doesn't really change this, it only changes the
method one uses to get to those features[*].


.mrg


[*] note that moving to ELF brings some new features but this is
orthogonal as they are basically implementation issues.