libInventor.so.0.0.0: bug or feature?

[Linus Walleij]

On Wed, 14 Feb 2007, Laurent Rineau wrote:

> Having libXXX.so.0.0.0 as soversion probably means that the somajor and
> soversion are not set by the upstream developers (GNU/autotools defaults the
> soversion to 0.0.0). It probably means that next release of the library will
> have the same set of somajor/soversion, whatever is the binary compatibility
> of that release with the previous one.

The typical way to use this during early development is to release 
libfoo-1.0.so.0, then libfoo-1.1.so.0 etc, as a marker that the package is 
pre-alpha.

However it should be noticed that library versioning is so hairy and 
unproperly undocumented that 90% of developers invariably get it wrong the 
first time and also later. So they often need education. I have myself 
needed much education on this and I still do mistakes... So give advice 
and patches to upstream.

Linus