Version number problem with libXfont and others

[Joseph Parmelee]

Hello all:

I just got bit by the versioning of libXfont.  The new libXfont-1.2.0
produces libXfont.so.1.4.1.  However, the monolithic build of 6.9.0 which is
also necessarily on my development system, produces libXfont.so.1.5.  Being
unaware of this version regression, I blithely ran ldconfig after installing
the new modular libXfont assuming the new library would be linked.  And of
course despite the fact that this upgrade was specifically to fix crashes
with freetype-2.2.1, I continued to get those nasty xserver lockups
requiring system reboots whenever an X utility tried to render a truetype
font.

After some essential confusion, I realized the source of the problem, and on
further inspection I see there are similar problems with other modules.

It would have been nice if system maintainers could have incrementally moved
from the monolithic build, gradually replacing those modules that needed to
be upgraded.  But in order for that to be possible, the versioning policies
between 6.9.0 and the modular builds must be consistent.

What is the current shared object versioning policy as regards previous
XFree86 releases, and the xorg monolithic 6.9.0 release?


Regards,

Joseph Parmelee
printf("%s@%s.%s\n","jparmele","wildbear","com")