On Sun, 19 May 2002, Alan Barrett wrote:

> I can see why we don't want binary packages built against new versions
> of libpng.so to be installed with old versions of libpng.so, but the
> same argument doesn't seem to hold for packages built from sources.  It
> seems to me that it would be reasonable for a binary package to depend
> on *exactly* the version of any shared library packages that it was
> built with, but for the corresponding source package to have much looser
> dependencies.

That's not ideal, either. You're supposed to be able to replace an
older version of a shared library with a newer one with the same
soname (major). And besides, many packages bump versions without
necessarily bumping the version of their shared libraries -- many
packages don't even have shared libraries, but yet the oldest versions
may still be unsuitable for some purpose. I seem to recall that in the
pre-wildcard era, when everything was locked down, users were finding
the binary package situation worse than it is now.

Frederick