[Scottish] SVGAlib

[Graeme Mathieson]

On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 11:19:44PM +0000, Mark Marsella wrote:
> 
> Might be, but normally new old libs are subsets of new and so function.  
> (unless of course they have been totally rewritten). 

No.  Not if they are doing soname versioning correctly.  If the new
version is ABI-compatible with the old version, you only bump the minor
version.  If it's ABI-incompatible (stuff needs to be rebuilt against
the new version of the library), you bump the major version number.

Of course, doing the symlinking thing *might* work for you if the
application uses a subset of the library's interface which hasn't
changed or if the developers are randomly bumping the major number for
no reason.  But it *is* dangerous.  Particularly with applications
linked against svgalib which, iirc, have to be suid root to run
correctly...

A quick Google search turns up this paper which almost certainly
explains it better than I do:

http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/als2000/full_papers/browndavid/browndavid_html/
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