Re: Headsup: ncurses soname bump 5 to 6

On Thu, Sep 18, 2008 at 2:03 PM, Julien Cristau <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Going forward, though, can you avoid potential issues like this
>> by maintaining better ABI compatibility between versions?
>> i.e. when you add a libncurses.so.7, can you make it so
>> that all apps that linked against libncurses.so.6 still continue
>> to work without recompilation?
>
> This doesn't make any sense.  If all apps linked against the previous
> version continued to work without recompilation, it wouldn't be an
> incompatible ABI change, and so wouldn't require a SONAME bump.

You still need an SONAME burp if some apps linked against the
newer library (say, those using new features) would fail with the older one.
i.e. unless a change is both forward and backwards compatible,
you can't get away without some sort of burp.  (Or am I confused?)