Quoting Thomas Frohwein <tfrohwein@fastmail.com>:

> On Wed, Jul 31, 2024 at 09:48:31PM +0200, Robert Palm wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I would like to know why, the following libs are named
>>
>> libSDL2_image.so.1.1
>> libSDL2_ttf.so.0.1
>>
>> and not
>>
>> libSDL2_image-2.0.so.0
>> libSDL2_ttf-2.0.so.0
>>
>> Ports:
>> devel/sdl2-image
>> devel/sdl2_ttf
>>
>> Is it because of CMAKE_SHARED_LIBRARY_SUFFIX ? How does it work?
>>
>> Thank you.
>>
>
> As to the why in the sense of the reason for the decision - this
> decision was made before my time. My understanding is that upstream
> decision to append '-2.0' didn't serve a useful purpose (SDL2 in the
> library name really tells you everything and at this point it looks
> like the next version will be SDL3).
>
> Also note the comment in CMakeLists.txt:
>
> # For historical reasons, the library name redundantly includes the major
> # version twice: libSDL2-2.0.so.0.
>
> As to the technical why - the port uses configure/Makefile and the patch
> for Makefile.in removes the use of LT_RELEASE which is responsible for
> the '-2.0' in other platforms.
>
> This is for devel/sdl2, probably similar for the sdl2-* ports. At this
> point this is moot as upstream has already acknowledged that this
> library naming will be stopped with SDL3.

Hi Thomas,

understand - thanks a lot for your detailed explanations!

I'll simply use symlinks so that the sdl2 libs can be  
found...typically, they are refered to by the 2 "standard" designators  
like

("libSDL2_ttf-2.0.so.0" "libSDL2_ttf")
("libSDL2_image-2.0.so.0" "libSDL2_image")

Looking forward for SDL3 then.

Best, Robert