Re: Let's get rid of the separate minor version numbers for shlibs

Greg Stark <stark(at)mit(dot)edu> writes:
> It does rule out the possibility of having a minor bump in the soname
> for a point-release, which as you point out wouldn't do much on Linux
> but on other operating systems might be a useful thing.

I believe we could legally set SO_MINOR_VERSION to, say, 10.1 if we had to
(cf comment about it in Makefile.shlib), so a workaround is available for
that case. And the current scheme isn't any better: if, say, 9.5 is at
libpq.so.5.8, and we wish to bump the soname for its next point release,
we can't use soname 5.9 because that's already taken by 9.6. We'd have
to go to soname 5.8.1. So it's pretty much exactly the same thing.

Mechanically, that could look like editing the back branch's makefile
to say

SO_MINOR_VERSION=$(MAJORVERSION).1

This would not need to propagate into any other branch (unless we were
making similar changes for similar reasons in other back branches, of
course).

regards, tom lane