Shared library versioning
Hello,
I'm actually making some .deb packages out of a single source archive.
One of them should contain a shared library. The upstream author's
package's version is 5.13 and the soname of his library has been set to
513. After having contacted him, he told me that was done because
apparently each time the new version of the library became uncompatible
with the previous ones, the major version should be incremented,
something that was disturbing because the library is often subject to
modifications leading to incompatibilities.
After having searched around on the internet I didn't find any
information on this, but I read once again the SONAME chapter of the
debian library packaging manual and didn't see this "method" of
versioning mentioned.
What I understood so far is that when upgrading a shared library the old
version is left around and only the link libname.so is updated. What
happens now if I update this shared library without recompiling the
software that was linked agains the old version ?
Thanks in advance for your comments
Alexis Papadopoulos
Reply to: