[Packaging] soversion bumps on minor releases

[jtanx]

Describe the usage question you have. Please include as many useful details as possible.

Hi, the latest release of pyarrow bumps the soversion to 1601. It's painful enough that the soversion bumps with every major release, but is there a need to bump the soversion on minor releases? Are breaking abi changes really being released on minor releases?

Component(s)

Python

[kou]

@pitrou What do you think about this? FYI: #4801 for the current versioning schema.

[pitrou]

We're not supposed to break the ABI in bugfix releases, so I don't know why the soversion was bumped.

[jorisvandenbossche]

The latest 16.1.0 release was not a bug-fix release, but a minor / feature release, though (and the first time we ever did this since 1.0, AFAIK, so I don't know if we have explicit expectations around this, I personally would expect that a feature release is not ABI stable)

[pitrou]

Ah, right. Well, 16.1.0 is a slightly unusual case then.

[jtanx]

Imo if this is going to be a breaking abi change it might as well be a major version bump

[jorisvandenbossche]

To be clear, we explicitly decided to bump the so version for minor feature releases at the time of the first 1.0.0 release. See this issue Kou linked above (#4801) and this email thread: https://lists.apache.org/thread/r1ztq38xz5tn4p4v0xc1xk2d8x82p84v)

[jorisvandenbossche]

I opened an issue about that we need to better document the expectations: #41707

[jorisvandenbossche]

Let's close this in favor of discussing it further in #41707