Bug#708566: library -dev naming policy encourages unnecessary transitions

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Package: debian-policy
Severity: normal

Policy 8.4 currently says:

    If there are development files associated with a shared library,
    the source package needs to generate a binary development package
    named librarynamesoversion-dev, or if you prefer only to support one
    development version at a time, libraryname-dev.

This encourages unnecessary transitions since the SONAME may change
without significant changes to the API, and the latter is what the -dev
package naming is about.  Changing the -dev package name is quite
disruptive, since it normally requires sourceful uploads of all packages
that Build-Depend on the library and can't be done with binNMUs.

I think we should instead encourage -dev packages to be unversioned by
default, much more strongly than we currently do.  It's rare that
supporting multiple versions of the API in the archive at the same time
is actually required or a good idea.  In the rare cases that it is, I
think the version in the -dev package name should reflect some sort of
upstream API version, not the SONAME (which is about ABI compatibility).

-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-686-pae (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash