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Re: soversion for shared libraries?



Junichi Uekawa wrote:

> Hi,
> 
>> 
>> Maybe I haven't seen it, but IMHO the Debian policy should
>> be more precise about _which_ soversion to use for shared
>> libraries.
>> 
>> Can we use our own soversion, ignoring other Linux distros
>> and the rest of the world? Is upstream always right?

Use upstream's soversion unless upstream broke binary compatibility without
changing soversion.  In which case use a custom soversion which isn't going
to be used by upstream or anyone else (so as to avoid the appearance of
working when it doesn't.)  Soversions with 'debian' in them have been used
in the past.

>> Of course this affects portability on binary level. In my case
>> I stumbled over libpcre3.
Hmm, what's used by upstream?  Other distros?

> 
> This isn't too much of a policy issue.
No.  This is more "best practices".

> It's about 
> 
> 1. backwards compatibility within Debian
> 
> 2. cross-distribution binary-compatibility
> 
> 3. upstream compatibility
> 
> where 2 and 3 are usually less important than 1, since we don't
> pretend to be binary-compatible with other distributions.

Well, actually we do to some extent.  That's part of why we dropped support
for real i386.  We do try to make the *core compiler support* libraries
binary compatible: stuff like libc and libstc++.  This is simply a
convenience for users, because it's not uncommon to want to install
something compiled against, say, Red Hat's glibc and libstdc++.  It's
certainly not that important for packages which aren't spectacularly
heavily used.

-- 
Nathanael Nerode  <neroden@fastmail.fm>

Bush admitted to violating FISA and said he was proud of it.
So why isn't he in prison yet?...



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