2005.01.29 18:27 "[Tiff] soname of libtiffxx (debian)", by Jay Berkenbilt

For the debian libtiff packages, I'm planning on using an soname of "0" for libtiffxx. Since the (welcome) C++ interfaces seem to be somewhat volatile at the moment, it's not clear to me whether ABI changes to libtiffxx might be faster than those to libtiff. In any case, because of the mechanics of how debian packaging works, in the short term (next few weeks, at least), I'm planning on removing the C++ interfaces from debian's 3.7.1 packages to avoid 3.7.2 being non-compatible with 3.7.1. Once the new libtiffxx0 packages get approved, debian will have libtiff 3.7.1 as libtiff.so.4.1.1 and libtiffxx 3.7.1 as libtiffxx.so.0.0.1. Most likely I won't move the C++ interfaces back into the normal debian packages until 3.7.2 at which point, assuming no ABI changes, I'll plan on using 4.1.2 and 0.0.2. If there are ABI changes, I'll adjust accordingly.

This is mainly just an FYI, but please let me know if you see a problem with this. This is important to keep in mind for some future release when the much-discussed soname/version number separation eventually happens. Let's not blindly make the sonames for libtiff and libtiffx be the same at that time. It would be very disruptive to have to bump both sonames whenever either library has an ABI change.

Jay Berkenbilt <ejb@ql.org>
http://www.ql.org/q/