Mark Eichin writes ("Re: Shared library dependencies revisited"): > >> libc.so.5 libc5 (>= 5.2.18-2) > > Hmm. How are we going to determine the minor versions? I run an > "unstable" system and use it for my development -- but my packages are > mostly user applications that really don't care about the particular > rev of libc, just about the soname... so emacs, for example, needs > 5.2.18, but really doesn't care if it's -2 or -9...
The package version is the first one which contained the library with the correct minor version so that ld.so doesn't complain. I don't know how you determine this, but it's specific to the shared library and you can do it however you like when you build the library package. dpkg-shlibdeps just looks the details up in the file provided by the library package. libc5 is an exception because 5.2.18-2 is the first one that had the right dependencies &c for ELF conversion. Ian.