[FrozenCow]

This could have been solved on a different level. If the right architecture was in place Steam didn't need to solve it.

You can have multiple shared libraries of the same name, but different major versions. Applications that need the same version can use that same version. Applications that need different versions can use different versions. The package repository shouldn't be the conflicting factor.

[otterley]

Most distributions have provisions for installing multiple major versions of a shared library (they change the package name to libfooX to accommodate this).