Comment 8 for bug 915995

ldconfig is doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is to link SONAMEs to libraries providing that SONAME in the same directory. This is more a case of "don't do that, then" than a bug in glibc.

Since there was much asking about why this only happens in recent versions of Ubuntu, it's because the real linker (ld-2.1x.so) used to live in /lib until we moved to multiarch so, due to SHEER LUCK because of sort order, it was scanned first, and subsequent providers of the SONAME were ignored. Now that it lives in a different directory, third party linkers in /lib that provide the incorrect SONAME get picked up and symlinked. The solution here is really to not provide the same SONAME as the system linker, but a quick workaround for those affected could also be to move the offending third-party binary to the multi-arch path instead.