Comment 7 for bug 185868

Copying, moving and renaming libraries is bad. You can cause other applications to break.

The correct fix is for the wink package to be rebuilt against the newer libexpat library. An alternate fix would be for a compatibility package to be provided in Hardy Heron.

If anyone follows the above advice, be warned you are creating a potential for other programs to exhibit problems which are not going to technically be bugs. For example, if a KDE or Gnome application actually expects the newer libexpat, and you have made changes to that library, you can cause crashes, corrupted information, etc. Similarly, if you use the newer libexpat (by renaming or symlinking) for wink, it will expect the internal data structure to be a certain way, and this could cause problems randomly.

When a library changes major version number (e.g. from 0.x.x to 1.x.x) this generally means that the library may not be backwards compatible. Usually there are changes to the internal data structures, that are not immediately evident to the end user, but could cause issues if the program isn't updated to use the new libraries properly.