Re: [ft-devel] web page for the forthcoming 2.2.0 release

[Ilya Konstantinov]

Werner LEMBERG wrote:

> > What kind of problems would the version bump cause?
> >     
>
> Indirect dependencies.
>   
That's exactly what's described in this section:
http://plan99.net/autopackage/Linux_Problems#elf
>   
> > Are we not bumping versions simply to force all applications to fix
> > their code rather than sticking to their old-and-working FreeType
> > version?
> >     
>
> The very problem is that this won't happen within a short time frame.
> Let's assume that the new FreeType DLL version is version 7, and his
> desktop uses version 6.  If a developer now links his application
> against FreeType, there are high chances that his application is
> linked against version 6 *and* version 7 at the same time because many
> other libraries of his desktop depend on the old FreeType DLL.
>   
I can't think of many programs which actively use FreeType functions on 
their own. Typically, it's just the low-level layer, such as Pango and 
fontconfig, which relies on FreeType, and low-level layers usually need 
to be built (by the distro) for the same set of libraries for more 
reasons, such as libpng.so.2 vs. libpng.so.3 incompatibilities.
> Perhaps we shall *rename* the library to, say, `libft2', instead of
> `libfreetype', together with a new API prefix `FT2_' instead of `FT_'.
> This would avoid the whole mess.
>   
Renaming the library is not required, as the version prefix makes the 
name different enough. As the above-linked document says, the only thing 
that makes any difference is the symbol name, since in ELF, all symbols 
are "global".