[gst-devel] Re: Versioning of GStreamer

[Thomas Vander Stichele]

> > Your rollback statement is a little confusing.  I see two ways to
> > interpret it:
> Yeah, sorry. That was a pretty bad way to explain what I meant. What I meant
> that is when the major is changed, the minor becomes 0. Correct?

Yep, that's it.  I was confused because you chose the 9 -> 0 case :)


> > As a pretty much direct consequence of the ABI/API promises we make in
> > stable releases, it is pretty much guaranteed that, when Y is an even
> > number, A will always be 0, as will C, while B gently increases as we
> > add API (I hope I didn't make any mistakes here).
> This isn't libtool versioning--it's gstreamer versioning! ;-) GStreamer 0.8.9
> shipped libgstreamer-0.8.so.1.4.0. Also, 0.7.4 shipped
> libgstreamer-0.7.so.6.0.0. Are these backwards compatible with with the rest of
> their series?

No, this is still libtool versioning.  You just have to treat
libgstreamer-0.8.so* and libgstreamer-0.7.so* as two completely
different libraries for all practical purposes.  They're
parallel-installable, and you need to relink to switch between them.
0.7, because 7 is an odd number, was a development series that doesn't
make any ABI guarantees, hence it's normal for its first so number to
increase.

As Dave explained in another mail, it is true that
libgstreamer-0.10.so.1 was shipped, due to the reason he explains.  But
again, that is fine - libgstreamer-0.10.so.0 was actually still part of
an unstable release in the 0.9 series :) Confused yet ?

In the end, all that matters is that no stable release of GStreamer (ie,
the minor version number being even) will ever rev the first so number.

Thomas