Distros do this already, at least some do. It depends on the distro exactly how it is done, but Debian certainly allows multiple versions of libraries to be pa

Distros do this already, at least some do. It depends on the distro exactly how it is done, but Debian certainly allows multiple versions of libraries to be packaged (with variant names: https://packages.debian.org/buster/libreadline7 https://packages.debian.org/buster/libreadline7 vs https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/libreadline8 https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/libreadline8), and in Fedora, compat-* packages are used to store previous versions of libraries (eg: https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=23575 https://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/packageinfo?packageID=23...) There's usually some soft or hard insistence that the package that depends on the old version of the dependency should have a plan to update to the new version. Definitely in Fedora we don't "like" compat libraries, although we tolerate them. An interesting fact is the original RPM specification was designed to allow parallel installation of different versions of the same-named package. However at a distro level it turned out to be quite difficult to use this, because you have to be really careful about file conflicts. So now it is disallowed, except for the kernel package.