Right now we still use that weird libtool versioning where you need to do "weird" calculations and still end up with a version string that should end up being the same os our project version.
We even use these libtool calculations on cmake, where we actually don't work with these.

Additionally there are different places where the version needs to be specified. It is easy to forget one change and that can be very annoying.

We should documented that the project version should always follow the library version. (http://semver.org)
Although, according to semver, this would only start with version 1.0.0.
Which we should have released years ago, maybe. But we are not doing that now (since it breaks things).

We should also check what BSD is doing when we don't use the "standard" libtool versioning anymore.

We still use libtool, there is an -version-name parameter where we can set the version directly.