My question:
Does adding a new dependency to a library affect binary compatibility, as long as the library's external API is otherwise backwards compatible?
My situation:
My CBOR library contains classes for arbitrary-precision arithmetic (in the PeterO namespace). (It's in C# and Java; the Java version is in a separate repository, but the same issue applies to both versions.)
I have moved these classes to a new namespace (in PeterO.Numbers), and renamed them (retaining the original classes for backward compatibility), because the namespace where they are now is meant to contain only utility classes. I plan to move the new classes to a separate library and make the CBOR library call that library as a dependency, since the arbitrary-precision classes are obviously useful outside of CBOR. (I plan to eventually deprecate the old classes.)
But I'm concerned if making a separate library this way is a binary compatibility issue, such that I can't just update the minor version, but also the major version. The CBOR library is version 2.3.1 at the time of this writing. Am I able to do this and change the version to 2.4, or only 3.0?
