How is it determined if a package needs to be rebuilt for a newer Fedora version?

[Petr Machata]

Richard Shaw <hobbes1069 at gmail.com> writes:

> On Wed, Mar 23, 2011 at 8:19 AM, Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net> wrote:
>> This would be more appropriate on fedora-devel (any follow-up questions
>> should go there).
>>
>> Basically, you rebuild a package when there is a good reason to rebuild
>> it.  You've made packaging changes or you pulled in a new upstream
>> version are the main reasons for a package maintainer to do it.
>> Sometimes it'll get rebuilt (or you'll need to submit a rebuild) when
>> dependencies change (such as a shared library soname bump).
>
> I'm still a little green in this area. Do you mean that a version bump
> in the library that is not backward compatible?

SONAME bump in a library is a priori backwards incompatible.  The binary
won't be able to start if the library name changes, because the dynamic
linker will be looking for the library with the old version, and of
course failing.  The "rawhide report" and "branched report" e-mails that
hit fedora-devel, list all the cases where the library name changed, but
the binary was not yet rebuilt to pick up the change.

PM