On Thu, May 14, 2026 at 10:46:59AM +0200, Ansgar wrote: > Package: debian-policy > Severity: normal > > Section 8.1 starts with the following: > > +--- > | The run-time shared library must be placed in a package whose name > | changes whenever the SONAME of the shared library changes. This > | allows several versions of the shared library to be installed at the > | same time [...] > +--- > > This has two issues: > > 1. It is not needed to change package names for this. One can also use > "Provides: <something-that-changes-with-soname>" and have packages > depend on that.
Provides: would not work. Policy need to ensure that users can safely build binaries using the libxxx-dev packages installed by Debian and create programs dynamically linked with the shared library package they depend on, and still allow them to upgrade their system from oldstable to stable without causing such shared library to be replaced by libraries with incompatible soname and causing users compiled binaries to break. This requires coinstability of libxxx.so.n and libxxx.so.m. Provides does not permit this. Cheers, Bill.
