I'm trying to bring up a game based on the Garage Games Torque Game Engine (TGE). (http://www.garagegames.com/) It attempts to dlopen /usr/lib/libopenal.so which is not present in openal-0.0-0.4.20040726. Adding the symlink allows it to get further.
Not a bug. The symlink is in the openal-devel package where it belongs. The game must not dlopen it, but libopenal.so.0 instead.
Where can I found out more about the semantics of the version number encoded in the filename? I was unaware of this rule and haven't come across it any documentation.
Answering my own question, I found the required info in the GCC HOWTO Linking section, which can be found here: http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-HOWTO/GCC-HOWTO.html#AEN575