10.4. Library Versioning

It is important to note from the outset that the version number of your project is a very different thing from the version number of any libraries shipped with your project. It is a common error for maintainers to try to force their libraries to have the same version number as the current release version of the package as a whole. At best, they will break binary compatibility unnecessarily, so that their users won't gain the benefits of the changes in their latest revision without relinking all applications that use it. At worst, they will allow the runtime linker to load binary-incompatible libraries, causing applications to crash.

Far better, the Libtool versioning system will build native shared libraries with the ...

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