Comment 114 for bug 740815

Sorry to revive an old thread, but I wanted to voice my thoughts for posterity. Right now the embedder's story is something like:

1) Look for js-config. If found, use it to find the sdkdir, then do feature detection to figure out what JSAPI version it is.
2) Otherwise, look for libmozjs185
3) ... or for libmozjs
4) ... or for libjs

I'm glad to see that the mozilla-central repository has not taken the versioning used here into the library name upstream. I encourage everyone involved in releases not to worry about getting the JS language version involved in the library naming at all. It may often be of much less importance to an embedder whether the language changed slightly as whether the embedding ABI changed, so please stick to ABI compatibility when deciding version numbering for the library and keep one library name. I suspect backward-incompatible language changes are less frequent than ABI changes and much of the JS world is used to feature-testing for language compatibility anyway due to the variety of language versions and features supported by browsers. Furthermore, embedders who _do_ care about the language version can look at the define in jsversion.h. Changing library names just complicates things needlessly.

Thanks for all your hard work.