It's hard because underneath is a battle of who bears the maintenance and testing costs that no one wants to bear. Asking a publisher to qualify their library

It's hard because underneath is a battle of who bears the maintenance and testing costs that no one wants to bear. Asking a publisher to qualify their library against a big range of versions just means that they need to do a lot more testing and support. Obviously they want to validate their code against one version, not 20, and certainly don't want an open ended > version which would force them to do a validation each time a minor dep is released. Similarly when publishers say I will only work against version X, this puts a bigger burden on the user to configure their dependencies and figure out which version they can use. They would like to push that work onto vendors. What's a bit depressing is that these economic concerns are not raised openly as the primary subject matter, but the discussion is always veiled in terms of engineering best practices. You're not gonna engineer your way out of paying some cost. Just agree on who bears the cost and how you will compensate them for the cost, then the engineering concerns became much easier.