[FooBarWidget]

That's only what it appears like on the end user's side. On the developer's side, it's much more messy. We're talking about binaries that stop working between two releases of the same distro even when the APIs don't change.

It's easy to dismiss this with saying "it's part of the deal" but if it takes too much effort for minimal gain it's not worth it. I'm fine with breaking changes if they improve things but there should be at least a compatibility later for some period of time.

Unfortunately, simply shipping different versions of a library is not enough to provide compatibility. There are two issues at work: 1) as mentioned before, platform ABI changes 2) ELF works with a big flat symbol table, so if you load library foo version 1, but a dependency loads library foo version 2, then things blow up.

[wissler]

I am on the developers side, and if I can do it myself, certainly Blizzard with all their resources can. Or perhaps I'm just so brilliant and supremely competent that they'd need 40 engineers to do what I can do with a few hours here and there.

I guess I should thank all you naysayers for the compliment.