[Fedora-packaging] Policy question: how tight should cross-subpackage Requires be?

[Tom Lane]

Ralf Corsepius <rc040203 at freenet.de> writes:
> On Tue, 2008-05-06 at 23:01 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Hmm, you think a version digit or so is enough to encode everything
>> there is to be known about a package?

> Think of SONAMES in terms of APIs. Two packages providing a library with
> the same SONAME must be API-compatible and remain API-compatible
> throughout a distributions life-time.

Actually, I think SONAME is supposed to promise ABI compatibility,
which is not the same as API compatibility.  But that's a marginal
issue.  The point I was trying to make is that a library can have a lot
of behaviors that do not, and SHOULD NOT, involve breakage of its ABI
contract; and yet can well impinge on its ability to play nice with
other packages that are outside the scope of its ABI.

			regards, tom lane