Compatibility Within a Process

A word of caution; Creating a new externally versioned shared object is a major change and care should be taken to understand the complete dependencies of any processes that use this shared object.

For example, an application might have dependencies on libfoo.so.1 and an externally delivered object libISV.so.1. This latter object might also have a dependency on libfoo.so.1. If the application is redesigned to use the new interfaces in libfoo.so.2 without any change to its use of the external object libISV.so.1, then both major versions of libfoo.so will be brought into the running process. Because the only reason to change the version of libfoo.so is to mark an incompatible change, having both versions of the object within a process can lead to incorrect symbol binding and hence undesirable interactions.