Re: Discussion about why GNU/Linux system upgrades cause old programs to break

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > Alternatively, a program should be built in a way that it links to a
  > generic libFOO.so, not to a version-specific libFOO-nn.so.0, so that
  > upgrading will redirect the generic link to the actual library, and
  > programs will still work (provided that the new library is
  > ABI-compatible with the old one).

Why/when do people link programs with the version-specific form library?
Do you think people misguidedly request that?
Do our tools sometimes lead people to do that by default?
Can you suggest changes we could make to avoid such occurrences?

  > Not removed yet.  But, having read the relevant discussions, I won't
  > be surprised if it will become an error (thus the build will be
  > broken), and if the option to make it compile without warnings will be
  > removed at some point.

We should _never_ go to that extreme.

  > I always thought that in the GNU project we don't blindly follow The
  > Powers That Be out there when they decide to remove or EOL something.
  > Instead, we make our own decisions, based, in no small measure, the
  > benefits and disadvantages for our users.

Yes exactly -- and this means we do not adopt unquestionable faith 
in the decisions of a standards committee.

Here is a new concise explanation of that point:

We must never bend the knee
To a standards committee,
Nor may rashly we discard
Fruits of standards labor, hard.
Let us think 'bout what they say,
Then treat with it our best way.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman (https://stallman.org)
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)