Bug#83669: Shared libraries

[Brian May <bam@debian.org>]

>>>>> "Ian" == Ian Jackson <ian@davenant.greenend.org.uk> writes:

    Ian> The effect is that foo-dev (2.1) has to have a dependency on
    Ian> foo2 (2.1) because otherwise you might compile against a .so
    Ian> file and headers from different versions.

    Ian> This is bad because it makes it hard to upgrade your runtime
    Ian> environment to run new versions of things without also making
    Ian> your compilation environment generate new and incompatible
    Ian> binaries.

I am afraid I don't see the problem. When a new version of the library
is released that has incompatible changes, it should be released as
libfoo3.

Even after libfoo3 is installed, programs will continue using libfoo2
without any problems until they are recompiled for libfoo3.

The problem is?

You seem to imply that the versions of the libraries are incompatible,
despite having the same major version. If this is really the case, I
think the potential exists to break a lot more then just the build
process.

Please give me a real life example of why distinguishing libraries
solely by their major version number is not good enough...
-- 
Brian May <bam@debian.org>