From Mandriva Community Wiki

In order to enjoy better upgrades, it is important to keep old major library versions in the system so that programs which use them still work.

Contents 1 Naming Conventions 1.1 Naming on x86_64 1.2 %mklibname 1.3 *.la files 1.4 Special cases 1.5 Updating a package which is following the old library policy 2 Provides and conflicts 3 Adding an old-majored version into the distro 4 An example

[edit] Naming Conventions

Libraries in /usr/lib and /lib must be separately packaged, in a library-only package, named with the name of the main library concatenated with the major of the library (or soname, see below). These packages should not contain any binaries, which should be in a different package. The goal is to be able to install libfoo1 and libfoo2 on the same system.

First of all, it is fundamental that the source rpms keep the same name without any major number, so that the CVS repository contains only one branch for each package.

When the distribution must have two versions of the same library at the same time (for example, qt1 and qt2), the sources rpms will be separated so that we can include both versions in the distribution as two different, independently maintained packages.

Here's a generic example: the fo