In a discussion with Nate Williams, I have learned that the reason FreeBSD doesn't use minor numbers with shared libraries because standard ELF doesn't support it. Is this a hard-and-fast unbreakable rule, or is this something that could be implemented if it can be done in a way that's compatible with standard ELF?
It seems to me that there should be a way of working around this, by adding a field (either in a new section or an unused field (properly flagged with a magic number) in the header) to communicate the minor version number to ld.so, and having ld.so modify its search path by looking for X.so.M.N (where N >= the number in the header), before X.so.M. This shouldn't break any "foreign" libraries, nor break libraries created under FreeBSD when used on "foreign" systems. Am I missing something really obvious here? To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
