RFC on PR77828 and internal units

[Andre Vehreschild]

Hi Jerry, hi all,

> The patch I posted clearly breaks ABI in the sense that it renames st_read and
> st_write to avoid calling a wrong library with the code compiled with Trunk
> (7.0)
> 
> Personally I am OK with this because it is a solid line in the sand.
> 
> Another approach would be to call a dummy function say
> "check_library_version_7 in the library initialization code and that would
> also catch the problem.

Sure, but this would not scale, when one has to check for say,
check_library_version_7_3_53p9 and so on. Furthermore was library version
numbering invented to exactly solve the problem at hand.

> Either way, the new library is not 100% compatible with the old.
> 
> We can also do some things to be "more" compatible with internal units from
> previous versions, but that gets trickier and I was hoping to not go down that
> road. (back to the drawing board)
> 
> Regardless of my opinion, what do others think?

Therefore, my vote for bumping the version number. Folks using computers and
especially those using a compiler will now what to do, when such an error
occurs.

Regards and thanks for so quickly resolving the issue,
	Andre
-- 
Andre Vehreschild * Email: vehre ad gmx dot de