> That would be a case of either foobar's author not following version numbering convention, or a bug which can/should be patched. Suppose we substitute "1.2.x

> That would be a case of either foobar's author not following version numbering convention, or a bug which can/should be patched. Suppose we substitute "1.2.x" with "2.0.x". foobar now is following version numbering convention but the problem didn't change. Now what would you do? > We value stability over all else, and we cannot provide this combination of packages while supporting a stable system, so we're not going to This is clearly false. Package both versions and have apps load the version they're compatible with. Now the user can have all apps without compromising stability. RubyGems supports exactly this, DPKG/RPM doesn't support this without filesystem-level renames. Why do you think the latter is superior?