[netcdfgroup] NCO in Fedora EPEL

Everyone/Charlie -

I package nco for Fedora and Fedora EPEL. I just realized that I've left nco at version 4.0.5 in EPEL5/6. One reason for this is that NCO bumps the soname of its shared libraries with every release, e.g.:

/usr/lib64/libnco-4.0.5.so
/usr/lib64/libnco_c++-4.0.5.so

/usr/lib64/libnco-4.3.0.so
/usr/lib64/libnco_c++-4.3.0.so

This is unfortunate because the NCO ABI appears to be remarkably stable, and there is no reason to change the soname:

http://upstream-tracker.org/versions/nco.html

It would be nice if it just adopted that standard convention of libnco.so.0 for shared libraries and changed the soname only when necessary.

In general is it frowned upon in EPEL to update the soname of shared libraries as that would require every application that uses that library to be recompiled.

In the case of nco, this may not be an issue as I'm not aware of any other software that links to the nco shared libraries. If there is any please let me know.

The other concern would be any other incompatible changes to the programs and their arguments that would break existing scripts that use NCO. If anyone is aware of any please let me know.

In general, what are people's opinions of updating NCO to 4.3.7 in Fedora EPEL?

Thanks!

- Orion

--
Orion Poplawski
Technical Manager                     303-415-9701 x222
NWRA, Boulder/CoRA Office             FAX: 303-415-9702
3380 Mitchell Lane                       orion@xxxxxxxx
Boulder, CO 80301                   http://www.nwra.com



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