Who said you have to upgrade a whole machine when updating a package? Literally every package manager worth its salt allows you to upgrade a single package. And you can usually specify what version you want too.
Yes, ISVs have the right o package their software. But as someone who is both a maintainer of a free software project and packages software for a distribution, I can tell you that I definitely do _not_ want to deal with packaging for every distribution (especially if it's some magical "universal" package). I've used enough distributions to recognise that they all have differences that you really can't "just package for every distribution with one setup".
> Who said you have to upgrade a whole machine when updating a package? Literally every package manager worth its salt allows you to upgrade a single package. And you can usually specify what version you want too.
Only by playing musical chairs with the package names to avoid collisions.
Yes, ISVs have the right o package their software. But as someone who is both a maintainer of a free software project and packages software for a distribution, I can tell you that I definitely do _not_ want to deal with packaging for every distribution (especially if it's some magical "universal" package). I've used enough distributions to recognise that they all have differences that you really can't "just package for every distribution with one setup".