Josselin Mouette wrote:

Le mardi 30 septembre 2008 à 11:37 -0500, Ian Bicking a écrit :

Say I have a package that represents an application.

[snip]

Then HardJSON 2.0 is released, and Turplango only required 
HardJSON>=1.2, so new installations start installing HardJSON 2.0.  But 
my app happens not to be compatible with that library, and so it's 
broken.  OK...


No, please stop here. That’s not OK. If a new version of HardJSON breaks
your application, it is friggin’ broken. If that new version is not
compatible, it should be called HardJSON2, and nothing will break.

I disagree with your assertion that the name HAS to imply API compatibility. There ought to be something that specifies API / ABI compatibility, such as the combination of name and some portion of a version number, but too many people depend on a name for marketing or other purposes for us to impose that it indicate technical aspects.

If your OS distribution chooses to do things that way, then fine, when your OS builds the distribution, it can rename it to HardJSON2 but that shouldn't be required of every platform.

-- Dave