Arch Linux

Description: When upgrading firefox 3.0.8 to 3.5-1 it requires to update readline5 to readline6. If you do that blindly. You will end up with a not-working bash.

-bash: error while loading shared libraries: libreadline.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Additional info:
* package version(s)
firefox 3.0.8
firefox 3.5-1
bash 4.0.024-1
bash (the installed from the USB image 2009.02)
* config and/or log files etc.
/lib/libreadline.so.6
/lib/libreadline.so.5
/lib/libhistory.so.6
/lib/libhistory.so.5

Steps to reproduce:
When upgrading firefox 3.0.8 to 3.5-1 it requires to update readline5 to readline6. If you do that blindly. You will end up with a not-working bash.
Every bash application will claim a wrong readline version.
-bash: error while loading shared libraries: libreadline.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
I could not login as root nor anything else. I manage to use the already root console (lucky me I didn't issue that with sudo)

and create a symlink from libreadline.so.5 to libreadline.so.6...
I though I was almost there but I got then a similar error for libhistory.so.5. And I create another symlink for it. And now I was able to login again.
-bash: error while loading shared libraries: libhistory.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I realize that that should be a bash problem and I decided to go and notice that bash 4.0.024-1 depends on readline6. I upgraded bash, deleted the symlinks and went back to normal.

Bottomline: Include a bash upgrade dependence when upgrading readline to 6.