my intention was to get a discussion going on this subject, not to sneak it up on people. unfortunately the pull request was committed without any questions.

obviously this decision is up to the developers, but here's my opinion on the subject:

1. if an application is made to compile on assimp 2.0, chances are it won't be compiling on 3.0. and so on.

2. the python library is a great example of how well multiple library versions with suffixes works, and no one seems to complain there doesn't exist a libpython.so. it proves that multiple version on linux works.

3. the SOVERSIONing is there to get old binaries to work. without a version suffix, a developer would only be able to target one version to compile against.

ideally we would have the assimp headers under /usr/include/assimp-3.0.