Comment 17 for bug 155784

What is required by the linux convention, and I must also add by the debian standard, is that the library package shall contain the library file itself, usually called libfoo.so.X.X.X, and its symlink libfoo.so.X which matches the SONAME.
In the case of non-well behaved libraries, like ssl, the SONAME matches the library name:

cesare@norsetto:~$ objdump -p /usr/lib/libssl.so.0.9.8 | grep SONAME
  SONAME libssl.so.0.9.8

At our level, we can't add a symlink like libssl.so.0 simply because this will break ABI compatibility.