On Fri, 15 Jul 2005 01:09:01 -0700, Michael A. Peters wrote:
I know that with shared libraries, it generally is not a good idea to push an update that involves versioning a shared library because the user may have software their system that is linked against the older shared library, but is there a general policy about other software?
With "versioning a shared library" here you mean a change in SONAME?
One of the packages I maintain in Extras is likely to be named as a sourceforge project of the month. The upstream developer is working overtime to finish implementing some things before that happens. The package is gourmet (PyGTK recipe manager) and absolutely nothing depends upon it - and I'm thinking that when he has these things finished, that might be a good time to update the package in Extras.
Since it is not a package which is designed to have anything else depend on it, I'm assuming there is not a problem with a version update in Extras? Is that the case?
If your package is the only one which accesses the shared libs, no problem. This is most certainly the case when the package doesn't provide a public API and if no other package implements an API either. Hence: no dependencies in Extras => don't worry about upgrades.