On Thu, 11 Aug 2011 14:10:44 +0100, PH (Paul) wrote:
Library SONAME requirement for _external_ builds ought to stay implicit/automatic, but _libraries and subpackages_ are a different problem space. A library update may add stuff without changing its SONAME and while staying compatible with existing executables in external packages. But executables shipped with the library package (in subpackages) may strictly need the very latest library.
There is no difference between "external" packages and subpackages: they both will need the new symbol some day.
Indeed, which is why we have version-specific library dependencies on libssh2 in curl: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=642796
This is just http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging:Guidelines#Explicit_Requires where a specific library version is needed actually and differs from what has been released before. It is neither the norm nor mandatory.