@benjojo I think that's a perfectly valid and correct way to do things.

Those funny suffixes aren't generally something you need to think about when packaging for Debian, even. You add the -dev package as a build depend, which includes a symlink .so without a version suffix. And dpkg-shlibdeps automatically generates the necessary dependencies for the libraries the binary package links against.

@benjojo I guess it's long been a tradition in the Unix world that software is distributed in source form. So it's not necessarily expected that you only install software that has been packaged for Debian, but it is expected that it will otherwise be built from source on Debian.

And there's still not a general expectation of binary compatibility between distros (without using Flatpak, or otherwise bundling libraries). But binaries *might* work, and the right library versions might be present.