rpm handling of new library symbols

[Julian Sikorski]

Hi list,

a bug was recently filed against gnumeric [1], in which the program 
refused to run due to user not having updated his whole package set and 
a symbol being missing in the older libgsf he had installed.
How are such issues supposed to be handled? Surely, manually introducing 
a versioned dependency for every library is going to be painful. Given 
that soname bump is required only for symbols removal/change, is it that 
if someone cherry-picks updates, then he/she keeps all the pieces in 
case something breaks? Thank you for the input in advance.

Regards,
Julian

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=891781