libpng soname

[Mike Hearn]

Hi,

I'm wondering if this is the right place to ask about getting some
standards and documentation on how exactly libpng is versioned these
days. I've attempted to understand this mess several times, with no
luck. It seems a few distros (red hat, debian) have settled on stuff
like libpng12.so.0 and others have not.

This is problematic for building portable binaries that link against
libpng. Perhaps there could be a simple standard drawn up that distros
can be encouraged to use, maybe with a stub forwarder library built in
the meantime?

thanks -mike