> ffmpeg and related av* libs make major releases frequently. True, not every lib keeps long-term stable API. > It's common for distros to carry multiple vers

> ffmpeg and related av* libs make major releases frequently. True, not every lib keeps long-term stable API. > It's common for distros to carry multiple versions of major libraries. Sometimes it's a frequent churn (like llvm), sometimes it's a multi-year migration (gtk, ncurses, python, libpng). This is consistent with what i wrote as these are changes in major versions. > C libraries aren't magically virtuous in their versioning. My statement was not categorical statement about C libraries, but it was about incentives shaping the ecosystem. Using libraries has costs and benefits. Frequent churn means higher costs, so it is acceptable when bringing higher benefits. In the C ecosystem, the cost for major version churn (or general library API incompatibility) is high, so people avoid it when possible. If sophisticated tooling like Cargo makes building against specific versions easy, it lowers the cost of churn, so everyone is less concerned with it. It is true that in C ecosystem, keeping stability is not effortless, for software developers it means running CI with tens of distros / distro versions, to test their software against diversity of library versions. Not 'just use my Cargo.lock' (i am not sure how widespread this approach is in Rust ecosystem, but at least some people argues for it in this discussion).