Re: Splitting up a library without breaking ABI?

[Matthias Clasen <matthias clasen gmail com>]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 4:20 AM, Stef Walter <stefw collabora co uk> wrote:

>
> Is there a way to split a library into two without breaking ABI?

Not really, now.

> The current pkg-config file library is libgcr-3.so. Would it work to
> have libgcr-3.so depend on the two new libraries (eg: libgcr-base-3.so,
> libgcr-gtk-3.so).

While this might work for most cases, you could perpaps construct
situations where it breaks.
But then, this is not really an answer to the initial question, since
you continue to ship the old library (at least an empty shell of it),
in addition to the two new ones.

> Or is this just not worth it, and I'll just worry about preserving API
> backwards compatibility in such a split and not ABI?

I'd say this is probably the better position to take.