Re: Getting to 8.3 beta1

Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> writes:
>> Tom Lane wrote:
>>> * Do we bump the .so major version number for libpq?  I think we should
>>> because there are two new exported functions since 8.2, and on at least
>>> some platforms there's nothing else than major number to disambiguate
>>> whether a client needs these or not.  Comments?

> Bumping the soname is an indication of a binary-incompatible change and
> means that old binaries *can't* link against the new library, and so
> everything has to be recompiled.  Please don't do that unless it really
> is a binary-incompatible change because it's alot of extra work for
> packagers to deal with all of their reverse dependencies and getting
> everyone to recompile.

It's not only a question of whether old binaries can use the newer
library; it's a question of whether a package's dependencies correctly
show that it needs the newer library (if it does).  Without this,
dependency-solving update systems like yum, apt, etc may fail to install
prerequisite updates.

If we can skip the compatibility-package pushup this time around,
I'll be as happy as anyone.  But I'm worried about getting into the
kind of mess we had in 8.0, where we decided *after* release that
we needed a soname bump :-(

Anyone on -packagers want to weigh in on this?
        regards, tom lane