Let's do SOVERSION according to traditions and documentation

[Sune Vuorela]

On 2026-02-23, Neal Gompa <ngompa13 at gmail.com> wrote:
> This hasn't been an issue for us as developers or distributors,
> because it's an easy thing to handle. What we probably need to start
> doing is integrating ABI testing into our pipelines so that when an
> ABI break happens, the CI in a merge request fails and blocks the MR
> from landing until the soversion bump occurs.

I do think we could have much gain of having abi testing in our
pipelines. I don't currently have time&energy to do it, but I've been
reviewing tools and data for these for more than a decade, so I'll
gladly look over one more.

> Distributions generally have good tools to handle ABI bumps when they
> are done in expected ways and there's good signal. When that doesn't
> exist, everything is a mess.

But this is not the expected way. 

> If it bothers you that much.

It does bother me.


reviewing a change where things go from

libfoo.so.6 => libfoo.so.1.y.z

libfoo.so.7 => libfoo.so.1.y.w should also make reviewers do a double
check because it is unexpected.


Reviewer time is one of our most scarce resources. We should not do
steps that takes up reviewer time if not needed. This is one of those
steps.

/Sune