E.5.1 Binary Compatibility

The Aspell 0.60 library is binary compatible with the Aspell 0.50 library. For this reason I chose not to increment the major version number (so-name) of the shared library by default which means programs that were compiled for Aspell 0.50 will also work for Aspell 0.60. However, this means that having both Aspell 0.50 and Aspell 0.60 installed at the same time can be pragmatic. If you wish to allow both Aspell 0.50 and 0.60 to be installed at the same time then you can use the configure option ‘--incremented-soname’ which will increment so-name. You should only use this option if you know what you are doing. It is up to you to somehow ensure that both the Aspell 0.50 and 0.60 executables can coexist.

If after incrementing the so-name you wish to allow programs compiled for Aspell 0.50 to use Aspell 0.60 instead (thus implying that Aspell 0.50 is not installed) then you can use a special compatibility library which can be found in the ‘lib5’ directory. This directory will not be entered when building or installing Aspell so you must manually build and install this library. You should build it after the rest of Aspell is built. The order in which this library is installed, with relation to the rest of Aspell, is also important. If it is installed after the rest of Aspell then new programs will link to the old library (which will work for Aspell 0.50 or 0.60) when built, if installed before, new programs will link with the new library (Aspell 0.60 only).