[Fedora-packaging] Packaging libraries

[Pau Garcia i Quiles]

Hello,

I maintain several packages on Debian and I want to get started with
RPM packaging. I. e. I am not a total newbie :-)

I am now trying to package Wt ( http://webtoolkit.eu ) for Fedora. I
already maintain this package in Debian (
http://packages.debian.org/libwt ).

On Debian, package names are soversioned, so that it is possible to
coinstall several versions of the runtime libraries. For instance, Wt
2.2.4 contained libwt.so.12 (which would had been[*] in package
libwt12) and Wt 3.1.2 contains libwt.so.21 (which is in package
libwt21).

This is useful in case you have a library libX and have an application
app1 which depends on Wt 2.2.4 (i. e. libwt.so.12) and another
application, app2, which depends on Wt 3.1.2 (i. e. libwt.so.21). On
Debian, this would be solved by installing packages libx5 and libx6.
Keep in mind porting from Wt 2.2.4 to Wt 3.1.2 requires rewriting
code, therefore unless the Wt packages are versioned on Fedora, it
would be impossible to coinstall app1 and app2 on Fedora (on Debian it
would be as simple as coinstalling libwt12 and libwt21).

I wonder how Fedora deals with this issue.

I have seen nothing in the packaging guidelines (
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines ) or the RPM guide
( http://docs.fedoraproject.org/drafts/rpm-guide-en/ ), and I cannot
find a specific guide for library packaging (something like
http://www.netfort.gr.jp/~dancer/column/libpkg-guide/libpkg-guide.html
for Debian)

[*] When I first packaged Wt for Debian, I did the horrible mistake of
not versioning package names. This required transitional packages,
which I will have to maintain until 2015 (!!!) because the old Wt
2.2.4 is what Canonical is shipping with Ubuntu Lucid. I'd rather not
make the same mistake again :-)

Thank you.

-- 
Pau Garcia i Quiles
http://www.elpauer.org
(Due to my workload, I may need 10 days to answer)