Let's do SOVERSION according to traditions and documentation
Sune Vuorela <[email protected]> Mon, 23 Feb 2026 11:03:39 -0000 (UTC)
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.kde.devel.core |
|---|---|
| Organization | pusling.com internet technologies |
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
Hi people Historically and conventionally, abi versioning of libraries on especially unix-like systems, have resulted in libfoo.so.6 => libfoo.so.6.2.3 for e.g. SONAME libfoo.so.y. In CMake, you would express this with set_target_properties(mylib PROPERTIES VERSION 1.2.3 SOVERSION 1) where the first point of VERSION x.y.z matches what you pass to SOVERSION. There is nothing in the machinery than hard enforces this, although it is documented in the CMake documentation as 'common convention': With older tooling like libtool, it is not possible to make these different. Meson allows making it different, but the the documentation tries hard to direct the user to not do that. In https://invent.kde.org/plasma/libplasma/-/merge_requests/1439 Harald suggests to divert from the long established norm so that we have libplasma.so.7 => libplasma.so.6.6.1 confusing both humans and scripts, and wants a discussion on k-c-d wether or not we should follow historical norms or not. It is also surprising because one might have libfoo.so.6 => libfoo.so.6.6.0 nad libfoo.so.7 => libfoo.so.6.6.0 symlinks in the same hand compiled sessions. So, Harald asked me to start a discussion here wether or not we should divert from expected. This (the ability to have SONAME and x in x.y.z VERSION diverge) is a footgun that we should not use. So, what should we do ? /Sune