Arch Linux

Description:
Many packages do not have proper versions in their dependencies when they are linked against a specific version of a library. For example (using cat as my pacman binary is currently broken due to this same issue):
[laptop: mike in ~]> cat /var/lib/pacman/local/libarchive-2.8.0-1/depends
%DEPENDS%
zlib
bzip2
xz-utils
acl
openssl
expat

Note that no versions are given for any of these dependencies. However, pacman will break if the wrong version of any of these is installed:
[laptop: mike in ~]> ldd /usr/bin/pacman |grep ssl
libssl.so.0.9.8 => not found
[laptop: mike in ~]> pacman
pacman: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.0.9.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

I realize this can be easily worked around (at least temporarily) by making some symlinks in /usr/lib. But breaking package management on the system completely because I didn't upgrade my whole system at once is unacceptable.