> it's a case of a huge amount of effort to deal with arbitrary differences between distros That is not at all a problem for open source stuff: build your proj

> it's a case of a huge amount of effort to deal with arbitrary differences between distros That is not at all a problem for open source stuff: build your project correctly, and let distros do their job. Still, open source projects are too often doing it wrong, because nobody can be arsed to learn. > as well as fighting with distro policies that would rather ship the software with known bugs than allow two versions of a library to exist on the system. Sounds like if you need this, you're doing it wrong. If it's a major update (e.g. 2.3.1 to 3.0.0), it's totally possible to have a new package (say `python2` and `python3`). If your users need two versions of a library that are in the same major version (e.g. 2.3.1 and 2.5.4), then you as a developer are doing it wrong. No need to fight, just learn to do it properly.