Re: [platform-swt-dev] abi and versioning

["James E. Flemer" <jflemer@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 5 Mar 2003, Chris McKillop wrote:

> SWT isn't a library either, it is a DLL.  Semantics perhaps, but it doesn't
> set a SONAME nor do you ever link (-lswt) with it.  I am not sure what
> the policy is at OTI for upping the number, but it appears gets upped every
> 4-6 weeks.  SWT itself shares a version number with Eclipse (ie: 2.1) while
> the DLL is simply incremented over time.  You always use a matched set of
> swt.jar and libswt*.so for a given platform, so you don't replace one
> without replacing the other.

Hmm, I guess then versioning doesn't really matter that
much.  Let me give a little more background.  It seems that
SWT is designed such that any Java program could use it for
cross platform widgets.  Hypothetically, in the future
there may be other programs other than eclipse that use the
SWT.  My goal is to install SWT as a stand alone package,
and to have eclipse use that package.  Thus I am trying to
separate the install of SWT from the rest of eclipse.

I am hoping that this will all work smoothly if I install
SWT in some location (outside the eclipse/ directory), and
just tweak the plugin.xml/fragment.xml files for eclipse.
However, it seems that the <library name="..." /> will not
take an absolute path.  Any suggestions on how to load SWT
from outside the eclipse/ directory (other than symlinks)?

-James