summary: dynamic-link can not request a specific interface number reported: Rob Browning , 2001 tags: release-critical-1.6 When loading a shared library with dynamic-link (or indirectly via load-extension), you can not specify an interface number. You will get whatever has been installed most recently, which might not be what is appropriate. Specifically, when 1.6 is released, its libguilereadline.la or libguilereadline.so will probably shadow the libguilereadline.la or libguilereadline.so of an already installed 1.4. Guile 1.4 will then erroneously load 1.6's libguilereadline and will likely crash. To fix this, we need to 1) make sure that 1.4 will not accidentally find one of 1.6's shared libraries. 2) fix dynamic-link to accept a interface number to avoid this problem more cleanly in the future. 1) can be done by renaming all shared libraries to include the current interface number (i.e. libguilereadline-15) and needs to be done before 1.6 is released. 2) is harder to do and should be deferred to 1.8.