Because I was bored and needed to procrastinate, I decided to look at the history of packages using libclamav over the last several releases. This is binary reverse-depends in main on i386:
|
Release |
libclamav soname |
rdepends |
|---|---|---|
|
Sarge |
libclamav1 |
2 |
|
Etch |
libclamav2 |
9 |
|
Lenny |
libclamav5 |
5 |
|
Squeeze |
libclamav6 |
3 |
|
Wheezy |
libclamav7 |
3 |
|
Jessie |
libclamav7 |
4 |
|
Stretch |
libclamav7 |
4 |
|
Buster |
libclamav7 |
4 |
I started working on clamav around Etch (in Ubuntu, so it’s not an exact match) and transitions were a blast back then. Every single soname bump needed significant sourceful changes. It killed quite a number of projects. Of the four we still have in Debian (dansguardian, havp, icap, and python-clamav) only the icap modules aren’t essentially dead upstream.
I guess API stability counts for something if you want people to use your library.
P.S. None of the people working on clamav today are the same as when we had 3 soname bumps in one release cycle.
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