Problem with compiling GNOME 2.5

[Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu clai net>]

Hello,
Sorry if this is not the right list for this question - apologies in
advance :-)
I have been using jhbuild to compile GNOME HEAD from cvs.
Recently, metacity and nautilus were acting very sluggishly, and after
some poking around, I found out that the files that were being installed
in $prefix/lib were missing the *.so extension.
Example

[testgnome starship-enterprise lib]$ ls -lh *glade*
lrwxrwxrwx    1 testgnome testgnome       18 Feb  9 21:22 libglade-2.0 -
> libglade-2.0.0.0.2*
lrwxrwxrwx    1 testgnome testgnome       18 Feb  9 21:22 libglade-2.0.0
-> libglade-2.0.0.0.2*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 testgnome testgnome      91K Feb  9 21:22 libglade-
2.0.0.0.2*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 testgnome testgnome     1.4K Feb  9 21:22 libglade-2.0.
la*
lrwxrwxrwx    1 testgnome 505            21 Jan 18 14:04 libglade-2.0.so
-> libglade-2.0.so.0.0.2*
lrwxrwxrwx    1 testgnome 505            21 Jan 18 14:04 libglade-2.0.
so.0 -> libglade-2.0.so.0.0.2*
-rwxr-xr-x    1 testgnome 505           91K Jan 18 14:04 libglade-2.0.
so.0.0.2*

This is not an isolated issue - I noted the same problem with a number
of other files.
I am not really  familiar with the inticracies of the auto* tools and
libtool, and so I am totally confused here.
Any pointers towards what is going wrong would be much appreciated.

I am running Mandrake 9.2.

-thanks-
Sayamindu