Correct. Multi-version packages are not supported by dpkg. They are supported by rpm in limited circumstances (no file conflicts allowed!). Fedora and openSUSE

Correct. Multi-version packages are not supported by dpkg. They are supported by rpm in limited circumstances (no file conflicts allowed!). Fedora and openSUSE kernel packages work this way, as an example. The way Debian works around this is by doing "<name>-<version>" as the package name. This is a valid approach, though it makes package name discovery a bit more difficult at times... As for multiple versions of packages in the repo, "createrepo"/"createrepo_c" (for RPM repositories) does not care. And for Debian, "dpkg-scanpackages" can be made to not care too, using the "--multiversion" switch: https://www.mankier.com/1/dpkg-scanpackages#--multiversion https://www.mankier.com/1/dpkg-scanpackages#--multiversion This is somewhat at your peril, as I've observed APT getting confused when it parses metadata from repositories produced by dpkg-scanpackages that allows multiple versions in the repository. However, reprepro does not support this at all, so most deployments with semi-large Debian repositories will not have this option available to them anyway.