Re: [Help] Versioning of a library

[Kurt Roeckx <kurt@roeckx.be>]

On Sat, Apr 22, 2006 at 11:10:35PM +0200, Andreas Tille wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm the maintainer of libgtkdatabox-0.2.3.0-0.  Until now there
> was no request for an update of the upstream version and I had
> personal reasons to stay with an outdated version.  Now I was
> asked to package the latest version and the library is probably
> not important enough to keep different versions and thus I will
> package version 0.5.2.0 that is the latest version avialable from
> http://www.eudoxos.de/gtk/gtkdatabox/ . My guess is that there
> is an ABI change involved and thus I have to rename the package
> to libgtkdatabox-0.5.2.0-X .  My question is: What is the right
> choice for 'X' if I skipped several upstream versions inbetween?

The current library in the archive seems to be
libgtkdatabox-0.2.4.7-0, and not libgtkdatabox-0.2.3.0-0.

The currently library seems to be libgtkdatabox-0.2.4.so.7.0.0
and has an soname of libgtkdatabox-0.2.4.so.7.  I guess the the
new one will have something like libgtkdatabox-0.5.2.so.0?

I don't see what you feel the need to add this extra -X to your
library name, libgtkdatabox-0.5.2.0 should be good enough.  As
long as he changes the soname when he breaks the ABI.  And it
seems upstream even seems to change soname for every release, so
I don't see that as a problem.

However, it would be better if upstream actually didn't change
soname every release.  He seems to be using the soname as a
version, which isn't how it should get used.


Kurt