Re: libpq API incompatibility between 7.4 and 8.0

Tom Lane wrote:
> Well, if you just want to bump libpq's SO_MAJOR_VERSION, I won't
> object.

Yes. Unless someone objects, I will do that for 8.0.* and 8.1.*.

> The Linux conventions for library names, for one,
> essentially require us to bump SO_MAJOR_VERSION for every release if
> we want to have any hope of letting different versions coexist.
> Perhaps our convention should be to bump SO_MAJOR_VERSION for each of
> our major releases and only use SO_MINOR_VERSION when we change a
> library in a dot-release.

Well, the goal for coexistence is mainly the server and the
server-dependent tools (pg_dump, psql, etc.). There is no per-se
requirement to have libpq versions to coexist. If libpq has different
sonames in different releases, then they would end up in differently
named packages anyway (at least in Debian). If they don't have
different sonames, then we declare that they are compatible, so it
should be OK to have only the latest version installed. That requires
us to stay honest with the sonames, but it does not require us to
increase the sonames unnecessarily.

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/