At the moment the library SONAME version is 0. To work well in a Linux environment with programs linked to the shared library, the library should change SONAME version every time a non-backwards compatible change is done. One example like this is the removal of symbols.

While working on updating sqlcipher in Debian, I discovered that several times between the current Debian release 3.4.1 and the latest version 4.5.5 backwards compatibility was broken without changing the SONAME.

To update the SONAME, the -version-info "8:6:8" statement in Makefile.in need to be updated, and the diff between the first and third number need to increase. At the moment the SONAME version is 8-8=0, while in the new version in Debian I plan to move to 9:6:8 to get 9-8=1.

https://tracker.debian.org/sqlcipher