On Thu, 23 Sep 2010, Hendrik Visage wrote:

> I've been having troubles with 7.19 vs 7.21 etc. in tests w.r.t. the C++
> wrappers... and me needing certain functionality that were not in the older
> versions, and thus the reason I wanted to have those extra versions when
> using these new features... and some where I had troubles with a version
> linked to the older and I only have the later version available.

Well, there are many aspects to this.

Version numbers don't imply functionality at all, they're just visuals that
are mostly for human consumptions. We have soname and ABI to maintain binary
compatibility and functionality for applications. Our ABI document describes
our view on that: http://github.com/bagder/curl/blob/master/docs/libcurl/ABI

Later versions may support more stuff than older versions, yes. If you write
your app correctly you should be able do downgrade the binary library and fail
gracefully for the missing stuff.

To me, it sounds like you're having a go at your own solution to a problem we
already have a generic solution to and that's generally not a good idea. The
better idea is to make sure we all work correctly and we have the same rules
apply all over for all platforms we can run and function on.

> The A/B vs. Release-$VERSION debate: I think that could be an "unwritten
> rule/advice" as I have not seen that, but rather that it should be a
> reference to the versions/etc. and then we could/should have something like
> Release-$SOver-$Maj.$Min.$Bug and have Release-$SOver point to the latest or
> stablest/etc.

I don't follow you. Where would that "pointer" exist? The latest we ship is
always the latest for all platforms! ;-)

> Ie. When we have feature changes, we need to find a way to indicate to the
> application that makes use of the newer features, whether those features are
> available or not...

We do that by returning error in the functions that don't support the features
you try to enable.

We also provide the symbols-in-versions document to aid programmers to know at
which point certain symbols appeared:
http://github.com/bagder/curl/blob/master/docs/libcurl/symbols-in-versions

I might also completely have misunderstood your points...

-- 
  / daniel.haxx.se
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