OT program requires .so although versioned .so are provided [Was: Re: packaging libraries with no versioned .so files]

[drago01]

On Sun, Mar 22, 2009 at 10:57 PM, Matej Cepl <mcepl at redhat.com> wrote:
> On 2009-03-19, 07:14 GMT, Alex Lancaster wrote:
>> recommend that unversioned .so libraries should go into
>> a -devel package.  I'm reviewing a package, eclib, that has no
>> versioned .so libraries at all:
>
> Sorry for OT question, but I am just fighting with
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=471180 and it seems
> to be similar case. Reporter claims that making a symlink from
> libpsppire.so.0.0 to libpsppire.so makes *THE MAIN PROGRAM* not
> crashing. Does it make any sense to anybody? Is the program
> broken, or did I screw up something in the process of building
> it?
>
> I thought that .so files are only for development, not for using
> the program itself?
>
> (and now I cannot reproduce it on my computer)
>
> Thanks in advance for any response,

Without looking at the code I assume it just try to dlopen
libpsppire.so and does not check if this actually succeeds so it tries
to use the NULL handle and segfaults.
The fix is to dlopen the correct version.