I'll admit that I'm guilty of this when I craft packages
targeting
Fedora. For the most part, it's because I don't have a good reason to
care about the soversion (aside from making sure it exists). When I'm
making packages targeting Mageia or openSUSE, I do actually care about
it, because the library package is supposed to include the soversion
in the name. Fedora's guidelines don't require the soversion to be
part of the package name (which I like), but at the same time, it's a
bit disconcerting that our repository policies and the way Yum/DNF
work do not allow us to take advantage of RPM's capability to parallel
install multiple versions of a package with the same name. Provided
that they don't have file conflicts, I don't see why this isn't
supported in Yum/DNF. I do understand it adds a bit of burden onto
Fedora to maintain a multitude of library package versions, but it's
rather bizarre that Fedora is the only major distribution I know of
that doesn't have a consistent policy on dealing with cases where
multiple versions of the same library package must exist (either
temporarily or permanently). I've seen different conventions used
across the board, which makes things very confusing...
This is a can of worms I don't even want to think about. Also, Fedora
does have such a policy, please read the guidelines for compat packages.
John.