Re: [Pkg-scicomp-devel] Library soversion numbers in SuiteSparse

[Daniel Rus Morales <danirus@tol-project.org>]

Rafael Laboissiere wrote:
> * Daniel Rus Morales <danirus@tol-project.org> [2008-02-04 18:28]:
>
>   
> > I'd prefer to contact the upstream author and suggest them to use the 
> > current:revision:age schema.
> >     
>
> I am afraid this will take much longer than is need for getting the gfortran
> transition into lenny.  However, it does not cost anything to ask.  Would
> you be willing to contact the upstream author on this issue?
>   

I will do this, but you are right, it will take more time, so we need 
another approach in the meanwhile.

>   
> > If they were not in the mood, we could start in 0:0:0, and increase only
> > the revision. The former is the better, the later at least let us to keep
> > the libraries findable by other packages.
> >     
>
> Increasing only the revision will be a big problem if the upstream author
> introduces backward-incompatible changes in the API or the ABI.  In sum, we
> will have to take the burden of updating appropriately the soversion.  This
> is what I tried to avoid in my proposal.  Besides, starting at 0:0:0 is not
> a good idea, because we will eventually reach 3:0:2, which will yield
> lib*.so.1.2, which will create incompatibilities with the current
> libsuitsparse package.
>   

Yes, I agree with you. Your proposal means more work but seems to be the 
better way by now.

At this moment I'd consider to split the package in as many libraries as 
it has. They share almost anything, and indeed they are available as 
separated tarballs. Then suitesparse-X.Y would be a virtual package 
which could increase the revision only when the backward compatibility 
were broken. This seems to be easier to mantain.

Daniel