[LAD] [ann] CAPS 0.4.5

[Tim Goetze]

[Stefano D'Angelo]
>2011/3/29 Tim Goetze <tim at quitte.de>:
>> It is very unfortunate that such a change might break the way your
>> bridge code works, Stefano, and I would like to apologise in advance.
>> (If the addition of a 'version' symbol exported by caps.so is any
>> help, I'll be happy to add that.)
[...]
>Regarding the addition of a symbol, introducing something into LADSPA
>(because if we agree on something, it's probably going to become a
>generic mechanism in the end) is really something I would avoid. It
>kind of both defeats the purpose of doing bridging well (i.e., no need
>to make changes to existing stuff) and also it would be unfair to
>recommend an addition to LADSPA without agreement from the whole
>LADSPA community.

Thanks Stefano,

this extra symbol wouldn't be an addition to LADSPA itself.  Instead, 
it would be one private to caps.so, completely independent of the 
plugin standard.

Like so, for example:

  void * h = dlopen ("/path/to/caps.so", RTLD_LAZY);
  /* assuming h is valid, check for caps */
  const int * caps = (const int *) dlsym (h, "__caps_version__");
  if (caps)
    printf ("found caps version %d.%d.%d", caps[0], caps[1], caps[2]);

Should you consider special-casing for individual plugin libraries a 
pragmatic and viable approach, I'd imagine something like this to be 
helpful.  (Put together, the caps library version and the UniqueID of 
a plugin guarantee a stable port signature.)

Cheers, Tim