How to do versioning of a shared library in Linux?

Question

Windows provides the resource file for version information for an application and DLL. The resource file includes information like version, copyright and manufacturer.

Answer 1

Linux uses the following strategy - you (the system maintainer) provide symlinks from a 'specific' shared library file, like this:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    16 2011-09-22 14:36 libieee1284.so -> libieee1284.so.3
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root    20 2011-09-22 14:36 libieee1284.so.3 -> libieee1284.so.3.2.2
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 46576 2011-07-27 13:08 libieee1284.so.3.2.2

This way, developers can link either against -lieee1284 (any version ABI), or libieee1284.so.3 or even to the specific release and patch version (3.2.2)