[Fedora-packaging] Packaging libraries

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 02:59:17PM -0400, Tom spot Callaway wrote:
> 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
> 
To answer the other, unspoken half of your question, in Fedora we prefer to
port software that depends on the old versions forward to the new versions
of the library and contribute those patches to upstream.  Only when we don't
have time or expertise to do this and the library upstream continues to
maintain the old library versions we sometimes make these compatibility
packages with the older API version of the library.

-Toshio
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