packaging shared libraries without autoconf and automake

[Chris Adams]

Once upon a time, Ulrich Drepper <drepper at redhat.com> said:
> On 01/22/2010 08:37 PM, Chris Adams wrote:
> > If upstream isn't building a shared library, then you have no good way
> > to set a version and then maintain an ABI.
> 
> Not true at all.  Why should this be the case?  The package maintainer
> should ideally _always_ be the one deciding the versioning.  I actually
> hope this would be done more frequently.

The Fedora policy is to push changes upstream, not develop differences
from upstream in the Fedora package.  Putting shared library versioning
in the exclusive hands of the Fedora packagers means we'll be back to
the early days of shared libraries, where one distro used libfoo-1.1,
one used libfoo-2.0, and another used libfoo2-1.0.  That was annoying
and confusing, and let to years of people insisting on statically
linking everything.

Fedora isn't the only Linux.  Managing the shared library versioning in
Fedora packages means that other distributions can't easily take
advantage of it and stay in sync.

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.