The upstream bumps the version when the ABI breaks. This is a social convention, there is no requirement for them to do so, but if they don't package managers c

The upstream bumps the version when the ABI breaks. This is a social convention, there is no requirement for them to do so, but if they don't package managers certainly will. Also many fixes DON'T involve breaking the ABI, generally it is a fix within a function so the function return type, name and parameters stay the same as such the ABI is not broken as that is all that matters, you can change the function all you want so long as it still returns the same thing as before. Yes it works very well in practice, and makes development much nicer, as libraries around my product can easily be updated without me having to update anything.