[nosequel]

You are missing the point. Even if erlang did support versioning of modules the problem would still exist. Package maintainers arbitrarily break things up because they immediately see a dependency and think it needs to be a separate package. They do this completely ignoring the big picture of shipping solid / tested code.

[asuffield]

On the contrary, the people maintaining packages in the distribution are firmly on the side of shipping solid, tested code. That hacked up duplicate of a library that you copied into your source tree? It does not have one hundredth of the testing that has been applied to the version of the library which every other package on the system uses. You have to think about the system as a whole, not assume it is a bootloader for one application.

[zaphar]

The answer here is don't package the application using that library then. You'll just ship broken software.

Or....

You can recognize that the author needed those patches to that library and figure out some way to include them.