This point makes a lot of sense, and I'm surprised no one noticed it
sooner.

How about we install xforms with our own release numbers?  It should
be easy to rebuild the shared library The Right Way using pkglibtool
since the static one has PIC objects.  If the API changes, we'll bump
the major, otherwise we bump our minor on new releases of xforms.
That way, our shared lib semantics are preserved, and, as a bonus, we
can even use DEPENDS=xforms-* in all the packages which use xforms.

So supposing the next xforms release is xforms-0.90, the package will
be named xforms-0.90, but it will install shared libraries as
libxforms.so.1.0.

Does that sound good?

     -- Johnny C. Lam <lamj@stat.cmu.edu>
        Department of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University
        http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~lamj/

Bill Studenmund <wrstuden@nas.nasa.gov>
> I think we should probably disable the shared library for this package in
> general. My concern is that xforms numbers releases more like a program
> than how we number a library.
> 
> For instance, the 0.86 xforms is NOT compatable with the 0.88 version. You
> have to re-compile source - the API changed enough.
> 
> Given that, I think we're safer making it just a static library for now.
> 
> Take care,
> 
> Bill
>