Bug#509933: versioning SONAMEs of shared libraries is not clearly recommended

[Raphael Hertzog <hertzog@debian.org>]

On Mon, 12 Jul 2010, Russ Allbery wrote:
> Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org> writes:
> 
> > There was a lot of background information missing from Policy, which in
> > my opinion made it unnecessarily difficult to understand the motivation
> > and implications of the various Policy requirements.  Here's a first
> > draft of a patch to add much more information about how shared libraries
> > work, better motivate the requirements already present (and tighten some
> > of the language), and add a should-level requirement to change the
> > SONAME if the library ABI changes.
> 
> > Objections, sections, or other review?
> 
> Here's an updated version of this patch taking into account the various
> review and wording suggestions.

Seconded with the small typo fix below:

> +	  The <tt>SONAME</tt> and binary package name need not, and indeed
> +	  normally should not, change if new interfaces are added but none
> +	  are removed or changed, since this will not break binaries
> +	  linked against the old shared library.  Correct versioning of
> +	  dependencies on the newer shared library by binaries that use
> +	  the new interfaces is handled via
> +	  the <qref id="sharedlibs-shlibdeps"><tt>shilbs</tt>

s/shilbs/shlibs/

> +	  system</qref> or via symbols files (see
> +	  <manref name="deb-symbols" section="5">).
> +	</p>

Cheers,
-- 
Raphaël Hertzog 

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