The unstable distribution includes more than a thousand shared libraries. They are the release team's nightmare, and each release is delayed by more library transitions. Still, do we all know what is a shared library and how to deal with it?

This talk will introduce the shared libraries mechanism and how the system deals with them. Then, it will focus on the best way to handle them in the distribution. I will give several practical examples on how to organize a library package, how to deal with unstable interfaces, how to interact gracefully with other libraries, how to avoid too complex dependencies, especially circular ones, and how upstream maintainers can make the packagers' lives easier.

This presentation will be coordinated with Samuel Hocevar's talk on autotools to avoid overlapping.