If you let everyone and their dog create and maintain packages and package dependencies and leave it to them to declare forward/backward compatibility between v

If you let everyone and their dog create and maintain packages and package dependencies and leave it to them to declare forward/backward compatibility between versions of packages, and your package manager ends up being popular, I think it’s unavoidable that you end up with a mess. Foo may not be updated for Bar 2.0, while the Baz you use states it needs it, Bar 3.0 may incorrectly declare to be a 100% stand-in for anything between Bar 1.5 and Bar 3.0, Baz and Qux may contain similar functions that would better be part of their shared dependency Quux, etc. Tooling can make navigating that mess more or less difficult, but the mess still is there.