I'm uncertain why someone would downvote my comment above, but shared library versioning is a real thing, and it is a best practice: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlined

I'm uncertain why someone would downvote my comment above, but shared library versioning is a real thing, and it is a best practice: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/abi.html http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/libstdc++/manual/abi.html http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Program-Library-HOWTO/shared-libraries.html http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Program-Library-HOWTO/shared-libraries... https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/als00/2000papers/papers/full_papers/browndavid/browndavid_html/ https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin... Linux distributions heavily depend on this for the GCC runtime libraries (such as libgcc_s); it's how they provide backwards compatibility. Many operating system distributors also rely on symbol versioning for their shared libraries as well so they can compatibly evolve interfaces for consumers. So my original point stands, if someone incompatibly updates a shared library without accounting for versioning, they're doing it wrong.