There&#x27;s nothing fundamental that means that has to be the case; in fact, Debian does (in some cases) ship multiple library versions in a stable release.<p>The primary reason this is usually not done is the work required: it means you need to support <i>two</i> versions in stable, <i>two</i> (or more?) versions in unstable, &amp;c. This quickly becomes a great deal of work :)