If any interfaces have been removed going from .6
to .10
, it is very possible that it breaks applications requiring a symbol that existed in the actual .6
but not in your .10
renamed to .6
. Read [1] for more information about sonames.
In any case, this is definitely bad practice and should be avoided. If you have an application which requires a newer version of OpenSSL than what comes with RHEL5, I'd rather just bundle the newer libraries with your application and use LD_LIBRARY_PATH
to have the directory containing the bundled libraries be searched before the system directores.