Re: Binary Compatibility question

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Mon, 2003-12-08 at 12:15, Edwin wrote:
> On Sun, 2003-12-07 at 13:57, Jean Bréfort wrote:
> > 
> > The problem is that you cannot have any warranty that an application
> > built with the gnome-2.2 libs will work with the gnome-2.4 libs (I
> > suppose it should not work). You have to recompile. Between two minor
> > versions of the same major version, there is a source compatibility but
> > not a binary compatibility, so something which can be built against
> > gnome-2.0 or 2.2 will build against the later 2.x versions, but will
> > work only after a recompilation. Am I wrong?
> 
> I don't know what the Gnome project's policy is on this- I'd be
> interested to hear it, if anyone knows definitively. For what it's
> worth, it looks to me as if you are correct in practice. That does,
> however, make it harder to write apps targeting Gnome.

Libraries in the GNOME Platform release are meant to maintain ABI
(binary) compatibility between all releases in the GNOME 2 series.
Libraries in the Desktop release do not have such a requirement. This
has not always worked perfectly, but we have come very, very close to
sticking to this principle. You can see which modules are "platform" and
which are "desktop" here: http://www.gnome.org/start/2.5/modules/

Your original post did not really nail down what your problem was,
though. Was the rpm not installing because rpm wanted the liblinc.so
requirement to be satisfied, or were there runtime linking problems?

If it is a linking problem, the you probably need to ensure the linc
package is installed for Mandrake just in order to provide the binary
compatibility you require. Sucking linc inside or ORBit2, as happened a
while back, seems to have generally gone pretty smoothly, but it is
probably not correct for distributions to stop shipping liblinc-1.0.so
if they wish to maintain full compatibility in their GNOME setup. This
is a subtle oversight, though, and yoy may wish to file a bug with
Mandrake about it.

Cheers,
Malcolm