Package: debian-policy Version: 3.8.0.1 Severity: minor I read through the shared library sections of Policy a few times last night and can't find anywhere where Policy unambiguously recommends always including a version in SONAME for public libraries. If you don't have a version, you can't represent the library in the shlibs format, so there's an implicit recommendation, but I think it would be better to make it explicit.
Note from: http://lintian.debian.org/tags/shlib-missing-in-control-file.html that KDE in particular has a ton of unversioned shared libraries, all of which appear to be private libraries for particular applications and hence already should be in a subdirectory of /usr/lib per existing Policy. The other cases where shared libraries aren't versioned (which are currently caught by that Lintian tag but soon will be caught by a new one) are similar cases of misplaced plugins and private libraries, as near as I can tell, with a few special cases. I doubt this makes sense as a must since there are weird edge cases like libSegFault, but I think a should is warranted. You need to really know what you're doing if you're packaging a public shared library without a version in the SONAME. -- System Information: Debian Release: lenny/sid APT prefers testing APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (1, 'experimental') Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash debian-policy depends on no packages. debian-policy recommends no packages. Versions of packages debian-policy suggests: ii doc-base 0.8.18 utilities to manage online documen -- no debconf information -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org