>> Uhm... I don't know why you have a problem with building your own package with the newer version. I do it all the time, for software both others' and mine.

>> Uhm... I don't know why you have a problem with building your own package with the newer version. I do it all the time, for software both others' and mine. > Maybe things have improved in the past few years, but last time that I built a dpkg for a Python library it was far from painless "Past few Debian releases", since debhelper 7.x, not "years" (well, this incidentally matches, too). Debhelper can build properly Python using setup.py and doesn't require anything special (no need to specify any paths) to put artifacts where they can be found by /usr/bin/python. It's actually easier than building analogous C code, since you don't even specify where to put what. > [libxml vs. libxml2 / libgtk2 vs. libgtk3] "Rename the package" seems more like a work-around than a system to handle the issue at hand. You're not saying, "I want libgtk with version 3.x". For DEBs, yes, this is the case, but you can have several RPMs with the same name but different version. On the other hand, working with the OS is much easier when the packages differ in their name, so this "workaround" is much more pleasant to use, even though it's not a "pure" solution.