[Gdal-dev] Release 1.4.0

[Alessandro Amici]

Alle 17:58, martedì 14 novembre 2006, Simon Perkins ha scritto:
> On linux where it's more common to use a central shared GDAL library,
> it seems that we typically don't change the library soname. It's been
> libgdal.so.1 for a long time now. I have no idea if the latest GDAL
> is actually binary compatible with the earliest version that used
> that name. Has that been a problem for anyone?

yes, just yesterday. a customer had a 1.3.2 install (with libtool and 
including python), but the linker found an older 1.3.1 install 
somewhere, so 'import gdal.py' was failing due to a binary incompatible 
change in an init fuction of ogr :( (can't remember the details).

so, no the current scheme for so-versions on unix/linux (with and 
without libtool) is completely bogus. or to be more precise, binary 
incompatibilities are not reflected by the actual so-version of the 
library as they sould be, so you can't count on that for library with 
incomaptible binary interfaces to coexist.

the libtool suggested so-versioning is explained in the libtool 
documentation:
$ sudo apt-get isntall libtool-doc
$ info libtool Versioning

you can find a down to the earth explanation in my 2004 post (i was 
speaking about version numbers but i really meant so-version, that as 
in the current libtool build are independent from the library official 
version):
http://lists.maptools.org/pipermail/gdal-dev/2004-February/002032.html

as far as i know binary compatibility has not been a priority in gdal, 
if this becomes a priority probably it deserves an RFC (ugh!).

cheers,
alessandro

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