On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 02:51:46PM -0500, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> If you add a version number to the Win32 libpq name, you have to update
> any command-line compile tools that mention libpq after an upgrade. The
> Unix linker knows about version numbers, but the Win32 linker doesn't,
> so adding version numbers does add quite a bit of chaos to the Win32
> compile world.
The funny thing about it is that the UNIX linker doesn't know about
version numbers at all. It just looks for a lib<libname>.so (no
version) which is symlinked to the actual version to use. Thus just by
changing a few symlinks you can control which library version is linked
in. Delete the .so and the linker won't find the library anymore (and
fall back to the .a lib) though runtime users still will find it
because they *do* have the version number, which is extracted from the
library itself.
I'm often impressed by the way UNIX is highly configurable yet
trivially transparant at the same time. The chances that anything
remotely similar would work on windws seems slim at best.
--
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> http://svana.org/kleptog/
> Patent. n. Genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. A patent is a
> tool for doing 5% of the work and then sitting around waiting for someone
> else to do the other 95% so you can sue them.