There is an updated pull request by ahesford against master on the void-packages repository

https://github.com/ahesford/void-packages protobuf
https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/pull/32984

protobuf28: drop versioned names and lib subpackages, update to 3.18.0
In a [discussion a year ago](https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/pull/18691), I proposed dropping versioned libs subpackages and the consensus was that the versioning should be kept. Since then, protobuf has been updated several times and we've always been able to migrate all dependants, so there's no need to keep the versioned packages around just in case that can't happen some day.

Let's drop the versioned packages to make upgrades easier and avoid polluting repo indexes with old packages that don't get cleaned. Users who need old versions of the libs for un-packaged software may need to build those old versions by hand, but this is just one of the pitfalls of using a rolling Linux distribution.

Another argument was about staging the repo, but that really shouldn't be an issue. Either everything gets moved to the new version or we have to split an protobuf version if there is a breaking incompatibility.

@Hoshpak you originally argued in favor of keeping the versioned naming. @the-maldridge I don't know if you cared one way or another, but you were the maintainer at the time. @q66 and @ericonr both seemed receptive to this proposal a few months back on IRC, so I invite them to weigh in.

A patch file from https://github.com/void-linux/void-packages/pull/32984.patch is attached