&gt; The basic problem with most package managers is that they ignore the soname mechanism.<p>Well, there&#x27;s a million hobby project package managers, so I&#x27;m sure many of them fall in to that category. But the big ones, the ones used by the vast majority of linux users, don&#x27;t have a problem with this (deb and rpm-based distros commonly version their libraries and install multiple versions side-by-side). This is a pain in the ass for the package maintainers as a lot of software developers don&#x27;t think about versioning their API, but it&#x27;s great for users.