[Greg Stein] > A following question asks about API compatibility. I believe we can > simply sub ra_serf into any loader/query for ra_neon. Hard linkage to > the ra_neon library may also need a solution (it becomes a shim?).
I was concerned with this exact issue when libsvn_ra_dav was renamed to libsvn_ra_neon a few releases ago. We did it anyway, I added a libsvn_ra_dav symlink to libsvn_ra_neon in the Debian package so existing binaries linked (unnecessarily) to ra_dav would not break, and apparently the world didn't end. So I figure the world won't end if we do the same thing again. (Going forward, it's already impossible to _directly_ link to an ra, fs, or auth backend using the Debian libsvn packaging. Well, not impossible, I can't seem to make it impossible while still supporting static linking ... but it's not supported, and if you do it and try to create a Debian binary package of your work, the package will be very visibly broken.)
