[csw-maintainers] berkeleydb saga

[Philip Brown]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 3:22 PM, Sebastian Kayser<skayser at opencsw.org> wrote:
> .....
> Now that we have a "moving version" libdb.so file (plus already existing
> packages linked against previous versions), the one question that comes
> to my mind is ABI compatibility?
> I know API != ABI, but API changes can break ABI compatibility and i
> couldn't come up with a reference that guarantees ABI compatibility.
>

The symlink isnt important. What is important, is the "SONAME" of the library.
if it is compiled with SONAME=libdb-4.7, then even if you compile with
cc .... -ldb

at runtime, it will be dynamically linked aginst "libdb-4.7".

So no worries there. the symlink is just a shortcut for "at COMPILE
time, use latest version".
When ABI compatibility changes, we bump the SONAME.