The number 4 is the soname of the shared library, which is libtiff.so.4. In general, the soname of the shared library is not related to the version number of the package, but is instead a count of the number of times the binary interface to the shared library has changed. Historically, the reason that the debian and ubuntu tiff library is installed as libtiff4 is because, at a particular point in the history of libtiff, there was an accidental application binary interface change introduced in the library. In order to prevent old applications from crashing when the new library was installed, the version number on the library had to be bumped. The maintainers of the libtiff software are aware of this, and when tiff 4.0.0 is eventually released, the shared library version number will be 5, and the package will be called libtiff5.
I believe there is bigtiff support in the hopefully upcoming 3.9.0 release of libtiff as well, and this release is backward compatible with the current packages. The tiff maintainers have not yet released version 3.9.0, but as soon as they do, it will appear in debian, from where it will soon migrate to Ubuntu. I hope this helps. I'm the maintainer of the tiff packages for debian, by the way. I don't generally follow bug reports on Ubuntu, but I check in from time to time just to see if there's anything I need to be concerned about. --Jay Berkenbilt <q...@debian.org> -- Libtiff-3.8.2 is distributed as libtiff4 https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/370472 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
