What i find odd is that he is ranting as if it is a code problem when it is a package manager problem.
Unless i am badly off the mark, ld will use soname to tell lib v1.0 from v1.1 or v5.97. But the problem is with package manager flatly refusing to have anything to do with installing multiple lib versions side by side.
That is, if they have the same package name. End result is that one distro use glib3.xyz to designate glib 3.x, while another use glib-3.xyz Yet another use glib.3.xyz.
They all hold the same files, but for the package managers they are different packages. And will resolve dependencies based on that.
Applying containers and/or sandboxes to this is a Will E. Coyote solution...
It is not just this. It is also that RHEL 6 will have libfoo4, while Ubuntu 14.04 will have libfoo6, and then Debian Wheezy will have libfoo5. Even if the way the packages dependencies were expressed (libfoo-1-3 vs. libfoo3) were the same, the constant ABI breakage would be harmful.
But that problem is largely because of what i started out with, that their package managers can't handle having multiple version of libfoo installed under the same package name. Even tough ld and friends can via soname.
So they "avoid" it by insisting on using a specific version for the duration of the distro version.
