> > This is probably a stupid question, but shouldn't libraries be built
> > with backwards compatibility in mind? > > The world isn't perfect, and sometimes mistakes were made and need to > be > corrected. When the soname (the bit at the end of the library > filename) > is changed, that indicates that compatibility has been broken for one > reason or another. You may not notice it most of the time, as the > change > may be in a rarely-used part of the library, but if anything ever does > call the thing that changed then it'll most likely crash immediately. Good point, i didn't think of that... > > Or perhaps we could ask Sun to simply build the SDK with forward > > compatibility in mind ? :-) > It's the standard C++ library, not Sun ... I was saying that perhaps Sun could have made the SDK work with future versions of that library. I don't even know if that's possible, i was just throwing out what seemed like a realistic idea at the time. > > I just looked at the libraries in my /usr/lib, and it would appear > > that many of them are linked to other libraries. > > That's different. Those are probably either links from > /usr/lib/libfoo.so to /usr/lib/libfoo.so.1 (which are for use when > compiling other software dependent on those libraries, not when > running > it) or links to micro-versions of the libraries where the library > interface hasn't changed. Oh, ok. When my SDK breaks from linking libraries, i'll follow your advice. (==timothy==)
