Re: Library sonames and unstable libraries
Justin Pryzby wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 09, 2007 at 08:46:59AM +0100, Andreas Fester wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Junichi Uekawa wrote:
[Andreas]
>> >> so I suppose that the format libfoo-1.2.3.so only exists for historical
>> >> reasons, right? IMHO new packages have to use the form libfoo.so.1.2.3 ?
>> >
>> > That's not quite the case.
>>
>> Yes, Steve already said that; so, if I understand it correctly, none of
>> the two formats is preferred over the other one, i.e. if upstream
>> uses either of them, both would be valid for Debian, right?
> I couldn't find it (or would have mentioned it), but dpkg-shlibdeps (I
> believe) used to contain a comment to the effect that the
> libfoo-1.2.3.so-style sonames were not to be encouraged. This might
> have just been a Debian interpretation resulting from some
> (hypothetical) bug report from maintainers of a package using that
> style (or something).
I'm guessing that people who name libraries like libfoo-1.2.3.so often
tend to (lazily) use the software version number as the release number,
so they don't need to keep track of (or try to prevent) ABI
incompatibilities. Hence the soname changes with every new version. I
can see why this behavior would be discouraged :-)
(Yes, I know Gnome/GTK+ doesn't have this issue; it was just a general
statistical observation.)
best regards,
--
Kevin B. McCarty <kmccarty@princeton.edu> Physics Department
WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University
GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
Reply to: