This question has been floating in the back of my mind for a while, and a bug I ran across recently brought it forward. What is the official policy for including version numbers in the package name? This is the way I understand it: In a normal scenario, for a library X, we would have the package libX. When a new version of the lib is released upstream, the new version gets packaged, and the version field of the package gets bumped appropriately. In certain cases where we want to have two versions available in the repos at the same time, we have libX1.0 and libX2.0, which are managed appropriately. The old libX becomes an empty transitional package which depends on the desired default (either libX1.0 or libX2.0). That is how I had originally imagined it must work, but given the way certain packages (in main) have been organized I must be missing something. I have briefly browsed the Ubuntu Policy Manual and found nothing pertinent. Could someone clarify please? Thanks, Evan