The versioning problem with libFOO.so.N already occurs with compiled programs. A C program compiled against libuuid.so.1 will fail to load if you only have libuuid.so.2. On the other hand, a Python program using find_library() will find either version. My point about robustness is that if a version 2 is invented, it might have different semantics or function signatures, and Python would then be assuming the wrong semantics.