Further, I believe that this is only an issue if there are functions in
the "real" libcom_err.so.3 that aren't in libcom_err.so.2 that are called by Pine and Pico.
Actually, it will be an issue if there are any missing symbols, or if the functions provided by libcom_err.so.2 take a different number of arguments, or arguments in a different order, or arguments which are pointers to different sized structures.
When so versions change, believe that the changes are incompatible, even if symbols actually resolve. Somewhere in there is a SEGV waiting to happen.
That being said, I've been using Pine/Pico ever since I got the Fedora release employing the link as described above with not-a-crash or
other problem.
Probably because you aren't doing any Kerberos authentication, so the functions in the library are never used.