> So, what do you do when different projects need different versions of libfoo? Well typically other people's projects I would normally rely on the distro to c

> So, what do you do when different projects need different versions of libfoo? Well typically other people's projects I would normally rely on the distro to compile other people's projects as well; and then the distro maintainers would sort that out. That may include making a patch to allow older projects to use newer versions of a library; or if the library maintainer made breaking changes, it might mean maintaining multiple versions of the library. Obviously if I myself need a newer version than the distro has, I may need to work around it somehow: I might have to build my own newer package, or poke the distro into updating their version of the library. I mean, honestly, I don't build a huge number of external projects (for the reason listed above), and so I've never really run into the issue you describe. It seems to me that the "language-specific package" thing is either a side-effect of wanting basically the same dev environment in Windows and MacOS as on Linux, or of people just not being familiar with distributions and seeing their value.