Versioned sonames have disappeared

[merkys]

Prior to v1.07.5 InChI has produced versioned sonames, but it seems that versions have disappeared starting with v1.07.5. Looking into the code, it seems that commenting out of the following lines in makefiles are responsible for the change:

#       MAIN_VERSION = .1
#       VERSION = $(MAIN_VERSION).07

Is this intentional? Uncommenting these lines bring back versions to sonames.

By the way, building with CMake build system also results in version-less sonames.

[JanCBrammer]

@merkys, after going through our internal meeting notes I can confirm that we've intentionally dropped the version suffix from the library artifacts on Linux (note to myself: meeting notes from May 21 2025). We did this in an attempt to make naming more uniform across platforms (the suffix only existed on Linux) and because the suffix was potentially misleading: neither did it reflect the full version (patch part missing), nor was it guaranteed to be correct (it was hardcoded into the makefiles, as you mention above).

[merkys]

Thanks for confirming. Versioning sonames is crucial in dynamic linking, at least from Debian's viewpoint, as soversions indicate the backwards compatibility of a shared object. In reality, soversions rarely strictly follow the source package version, as API breaking changes occur less often. It would be nice if libinchi had a versioned soname, changing of which informing whether to relink the reverse dependencies.

[JanCBrammer]

We didn't consider the importance of the sonames for dynamic linking. Thanks for pointing it out, in the next release, we'll re-introduce the sonames for the Linux artifacts.

[merkys]

Great, thanks a lot!