How do I prevent linking "directly" to a shared library name? I have this problem with some shared libs like openssl when I try to link to the soname but still end up linking to the shared lib name. eg

I have in /usr/lib...
libssl.so -> libssl.so.0
libssl.so.0 -> libssl.so.0.9.6
libssl.so.0.9.6

And when I try to link to libssl.so...
gcc foo.c -lssl -o foo

I would expect 'ldd foo' to give...
libssl.so.0 => /usr/lib/libssl.so.0.9.6 (0x40016000)
...
blah blah

But what I end up with is...
libssl.so.0.9.6 => /usr/lib/libssl.so.0.9.6 (0x40016000)
^^^^^^^^^
...
blah blah

How do I prevent this? Also some software seem to link to a
specific version of libc. So when I upgrade my libc, things start
breaking.

I've been on Linux for abt a year and I like everything abt it...
except the dependency hell . It's really annoying to have to rebuild packages whenever system packages change. In general, how do most ppl manage these dependencies issues or are rebuilds regarded as a way of life in the Linux world?

apt-get takes care of upgrading packages and dependencies for me

is that specific to any particular distro? would it work for
oddball distros? i'm using a highly mutated RH system
(basically using only their kernel and libc, everything else
built from src tarball).

is that specific to any particular distro? would it work for
oddball distros? i'm using a highly mutated RH system
(basically using only their kernel and libc, everything else
built from src tarball).

Well, apt was created for Debian, but I think you can use it for RedHat's rpm's too. I don't know if it'll work for sources.
RedHat 8.0 has up2date now that updates certain things and Mandrake has something like that too.