[geos-devel] 3.2.0 release ready for download

[strk]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 06:39:21PM -0500, Greg Troxel wrote:

> The shlib major version changed; probably NEWS should mention that. 

GEOS has 2 shared libraries. 
The one implementing the C++ API and the one implementing the C API.

While we maintain proper library versioning for the C API, we don't
for the C++ one, due to the way too wide set of exposed interfaces
we should look at to figure when ABI was or wasn't broken (and in C++
land ABI breaks SO easily).

> Are
> there incompatible ABI changes? 

For the C++ shlib, most likely.

> (From a packaging point of view, shlib
> version changes when there aren't actually ABI changes generates work
> that could be avoided; all depending packages need a version change
> because they only interoperate with one or the other geos version.)

This is exactly the reason why we incourage use of the C library
(libgeos_c.so). The C library hard continues to expose a compatible ABI
to the ABI-incompatible C++ library.

So, while GEOS 3.2.0 *c++* lib is a few steps away from GEOS 3.0.0 *c++* lib,
any code which linked against the *c* lib in GEOS 3.0.0 will still work
with the *c* lib of GEOS 3.2.0.

>From a packaging point of view you should likely properly encode
if a client is dependent on *libgeos* or *libgeos_c* as that makes
a big difference.

Is this too much confusing ?


--strk;

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