Why versioned library names?

[Florian Weimer <fweimer at redhat dot com>]

Why does the default “make install” command install the library files
with versions in their names and relies on symbolic links to provide the
official names?

Is this so that a previous version of glibc can be restored by using
sln?  If this is the only reason, is it worth keeping this feature?

I'm asking about this because RPM has some peculiarities related to file
removals and symbolic link updates during packages updates.  These
changes can happen very late, and scriptlets can run while the old files
and symbolic link targets are still present.

Thanks,
Florian