<DIV> <BLOCKQUOTE class=replbq style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: #1010ff 2px solid"> Scott James Remnant wrote:<SCOTT@NETSPLIT.COM> On Thu, 2004-11-04 at 22:14 +0000, Mike Hearn wrote: > The main thing is that Debian packages use package dependencies whereas > including the symbol version is mostly useful for RPM file dependencies, > ie Debian packages depend on libxxx >= 2.3 rather than > libxxx.so.2(XXX_2.3). So I'm not sure it'd be useful. > Dpkg currently translates SONAME dependencies into file dependencies at build-time using the "shlibs" system. There's an improved version of that system sitting on my hard-drive that also takes into account versioned symbols. The Solaris linker also uses fine-grained dependancies to help avoid "DLL Hell" when updating systems.  Not quite as good as the Multics mechanisms from a thousand years ago (:-)) but a good practice. I quite agree with encouraging it in a standard. --dave (ex-Sun ABI guy) c-b</BLOCKQUOTE></DIV>