Actually the crap in this case is probably one of two things.

There are some broken versions of libtiff around, although the versions in recent software distrubtions seem to be settling down. Versions 3.5.7, 3.6.0 and 3.8.2 seem reliable. The FAX image handling in version 3.6.1 is broken. All the libtiff related core dump problems I have investigated turned out to be due to a very old version of libtiff, or version 3.6.1.

spandsp is included in many software distributions, but the version included tends to be old and incompatible. If such a version is left on your machine when you try to build and install the latest code, you may well experience trouble. Most distributions are set up by default so they will happily build with one installed version of a library, but try to execute with another. The commonest issue that causes problems is that the distributed spandsp library is installed in /usr/lib, but the default for ./configure is to build and install the library in /usr/local/include and /usr/local/lib. For some strange reason many distributions set up their build tools to search for headers in /usr/local/include, and do not scan for libraries at runtime in /usr/local/lib. The solution is either a) add /usr/local/lib to your library search path, or b) configure spandsp with "./configure --prefix=/usr". This is explained on the installation page at www.soft-switch.org. You did read that, didn't you?