RPM installation on KDE

[Dale Alspach]

This is slightly off topic for this list, but I noticed that when I was
toying with installing the development versions 1.7.x that many of my rpm
problems were due to up-down version dependency. I find an rpm to fix one
dependency and it uses somelibrary.so.19. The next one says it must have
somelibrary.so.16 and not somelibrary.so.x where x>=16.

My question is: are the dependencies actually that strict or is this just an
oversight in packaging? How dangerous is soft linking, e.g.,
somelibrary.so.16->somelibrary.so.19 ? Is this better or worse than than a
forced rpm --nodeps ?

Dale Alspach