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Octave was built against HDF5 on 1 March 2010. http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buildinfo?buildID=159160 The build was performed against hdf5-devel-1.8.4-1.fc13 The hdf5 package has hitherto been updated to hdf5-1.8.5.patch1-4.fc14 which is binary incompatible with 1.8.4 that was used to build octave. Binary incompatible updates of libraries should break sonames, so that broken dependency chains are automatically detected and so is the need to rebuild dependent packages. It's probably not wise to break the soname now, since other applications than Octave might be affected. I just hope you will take these problems into account in the future.
Thanks, sorry about that. The issue is that hdf5 does its own internal check to make sure that programs are compiled against the same version that they are linked against at run time. There is not binary incompatibility between the versions, but the hdf5 authors are apparently quite paranoid. I think that a hard coded dependency or perhaps adding a startup file setting HDF5_DISABLE_VERSION_CHECK is the only real solution. I will endeavor not to update the version in released versions of Fedora again.