Please do not use librsvg 2.40.x; it cannot render recent Adwaita icon themes correctly.
The librsvg 2.40.x series is the last "C only" version of the library; it was deprecated in 2017.
During the port to Rust, I rewrote the path parser to be spec-compliant, and fixed a few cases that the C version did not handle. One of this cases is for compact Arc data.
The SVG path grammar allows
one to remove whitespace between numbers if the next number starts
with a sign. For example, 23-45 gets parsed as two numbers 23
-45.
In addition, the arguments of the Arc commands have two flags in the
middle of a bunch of numbers. The flags can be 0 or 1, and there
may be no whitespace between the flags and the next number. For
example, A1.98 1.98 0 0015 13.96 gets parsed as A1.98 1.98 0 0 0 15
13.96 — note the two 0 0 flags before the 15.
Librsvg 2.40.x does not parse this correctly. Adwaita-icon-theme-3.36, and possibly earlier versions, uses minimized SVG files with compressed whitespace, and will not render correctly with the C-only version of librsvg.
This is help-contents-symbolic.svg rendered with librsvg 2.40.21:
And this is help-contents-symbolic.svg rendered with librsvg 2.50.2:
This is not the only icon with compact Arc commands; there are many others that will also be mis-rendered in 2.40.x.
I don't know when Adwaita started using SVGs with compressed whitespace; probably it didn't when librsvg 2.40.x was the latest version, or everyone would have noticed mis-rendered icons.
Background: Someone recently filed a bug about memory unsafety in librsvg 2.40.x's path parser, which mysteriously enough only manifests itself in big-endian platforms. I wouldn't be surprised if this had latent bugs on little-endian as well.
Please use at least librsvg 2.48.x; any earlier versions are not supported. Generally I keep an eye on the last two stable release sets (2.48.x and 2.50.x as of this writing), but only commit fixes to the latest stable series (2.50.x currently).