spandsp ABI & SONAME

[Faidon Liambotis]

It has come to our (the Debian VoIP team) attention[1] that spandsp 
0.0.4pre18 broke the ABI while keeping the same SONAME libspandsp.so.0.0.2.
Every application compiled using a previous version crashes right now.
It's also possible that spandsp 0.0.5pre2 also breaks the ABI (vs 
0.0.4pre18) but I haven't checked, yet.

I've tried evaluating the ABI-changing changes but gave up after a while 
:) It didn't seem anything too extreme that can't be fixed.

However, it seems like it was your intention to break the ABI.
If that's the case, why didn't you bump the SONAME?
In fact, I don't understand why your SONAME is stuck at 0.0.2 while you 
obviously have released many versions since then.

We could (and probably will) bump it ourselves but that has the risk of 
clashing with you if you change your mind at a later point.
So we'd be force to name our version e.g. libspandsp.so.0.0.2deb1, which 
is suboptimal as you may imagine.

So, in summary,
Would you change your SONAME to libspandsp.so.0.0.5?
Or even libspandsp.so.5 :)
Also, can you be extra-careful in the future to not do ABI-incompatible 
changes?

Thanks,
Faidon

1: http://bugs.debian.org/479612