[Fedora-packaging] Packaging libraries

[Tom "spot" Callaway]

On 03/30/2010 02:15 PM, Pau Garcia i Quiles wrote:
> 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).

We strongly discourage this practice, instead preferring to only have
the latest available version of a library in a release.

It has been our experience that when "compatiblity" packages containing
older libraries are present, there is little motivation for some
upstreams to properly adjust to use the newer upstream libraries.

However, if there is a real need for multiple versions of the same
library, you should follow this naming guideline:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/NamingGuidelines#Multiple_packages_with_the_same_base_name

hth,

~spot