Nekochan Net

Can somebody explain to me a few things about library versioning? I know libraries have version numbers/string somewhere, but what are they, how are they determined, and how do you use them?

For example, I was poking at audiofile and esound. While compiling audiofile I see this:As you can see there is a part that deals with the soname and some weird version string. (sgi1.1:sgi1.0:sgi.2)

What is it that it does there?
What does this version string mean?
How is this string determined?
How important is it?

But then when I configure esound I get:
Now it only shows the last part of the version string (sgi.2) and it sais it's not an sgi interface version (a what??).

I clearly need some more info here before I'll be able to debug such weird errors.

Actualy I get this error both with my own build os audiofile and with the nekoware one.

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Shall I describe it to you? Or do you want me to get you a box?

Apparently it sets the version string in the DSO to a specific value.

The linker will check for this IVERSION string partly to determine which SO needs this library, next to SONAME. It differs from linux, because that will determine files solely by the name, whereas SGI has some nifty string for that. Go figure

Hopefully, the author has a specific number in mind with which it will set the version string accordingly.

quite, because if you screw up this one, the version dependancies could change. IVERSION botchups i haven't seen yet in Nekoware beta to be honest, but we had similar problems with f.i. the SONAME string and zlib version in nekoware and the openssl library. Neko fixed openssl and i fixed zlib and bzip2, but there could be more lurking in the grass.

You can interrogate this version string with 'elfdump -L yourlib.so' and look for IVERSION


Are you trying to recompile the stuff from nekoware? I am the one responsible for libaudiofile and esound, so PM me or phone me and i can have a look at it.