Bruce Momjian wrote: > If it is true that the linker only matches the major number, what value > is there in incrementing the minor number, as we have done in the > past?
It's main value is in indicating to the system administrator which version of the library he has. This is particularly useful in the face of security updates. A library can have bugfixes (even significant ones) and still be binary compatible with a previous revision. Situations like that are what the minor number is useful for. It can make the developer's (or administrator's) life a little easier, since it means he can have multiple minor revisions installed on his system and change the major revision symlink to point to whichever one he wishes to actually use (given the way the dynamic linker works, the administrator can name the actual target of the symlink whatever he wishes so it's not mandatory that the developers do that for him...it just makes his life easier). I probably should have gone into a little more detail about how the linker does its thing: it looks for a literal match for what the application says it was compiled against. When the application was linked, if the library it was linked against said it was 'libpg.so.2' (As far as I know, the compile-time linker retrieves this from the library's header information, not from its filename), then that's what gets stored in the application's executable header and is what the runtime linker looks for. libpg.so.2 may be a symlink to (e.g.) libpg.so.2.1 or a hard link, or a copy of a library for that matter. The runtime linker will successfully link the shared library into the program's memory image in any of those cases -- it only has to find a shared library whose filename is the same as what's requested *and* whose header information provides the same name. -- Kevin Brown [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: if posting/reading through Usenet, please send an appropriate subscribe-nomail command to [EMAIL PROTECTED] so that your message can get through to the mailing list cleanly
