To Require or not to Require?

[Matthew Garrett]

On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 08:27:13AM -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:

> Rightly or wrongly, upstream libfoo-1.0 has some additional utilities that
> access the PrivateData.  Because the utilities are built from the libfoo
> source, they can include the fooprivate.h header file and do this.  When
> libfoo goes to 1.0.1, upstream changes the definition of PrivateData and
> updates the utilities to work with the new datastructure.  Since the public
> ABI stayed the same, the SONAME doesn't change and external programs
> compiled against libfoo-1.0 continue to work but the utilities built as
> a subpackage would be broken without stricter versioning.

Upstream can change the ABI as much as they want without bumping the 
SONAME providing that the old interfaces are also present. It's entirely 
possible to end up with a situation where external binaries built 
against 1.0.1 won't run on 1.0.0 - the problem isn't limited to 
subpackages.

-- 
Matthew Garrett | mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org