>If one program on your system depends on a quirk of libfoobar-1.0.3, and another program on your system depends on a quirk of libfoobar-1.0.4, you're fucked. Y

>If one program on your system depends on a quirk of libfoobar-1.0.3, and another program on your system depends on a quirk of libfoobar-1.0.4, you're fucked. You can't have both programs on your system, and Linux distributors will simply stop updating one of them until the author magically fixes it, which happens approximately never. It's not true at all. Libfoobar-1.0.4 is backward compatible with libfoobar-1.0.3, so both programs will work. If one of the programs or the lib has a bug, then it's easier to just fix the bug than to add burden on maintainers. Moreover, both libfoobar.so.1.0.3 and libfoobar.so.1.0.4 can be installed at the same time, e.g. libfoobar.so.1.0.4 can be packaged as libfoobar-1.0.4, while libfoobar.so.1.0.3 can be packaged as compat-libfoobar-1.0.3. If you have more questions, try to find answers in packaging guidelines for your distribution, or ask maintainers for help with packaging of your app.