[csw-maintainers] Package incompatibility, any suggestions?

[Roger Håkansson]

I started to update libnet but found a problem...
The API changed a lot between version 1.0.x and 1.1.x which requires a 
rewrite of the code if you use libnet.
Since there are a number of packages which use libnet I took a look at 
their upstream versions and there are a few which support libnet 1.1, 
but also a lot which don't.

I've taken a look at how other tackle this problem and debian for 
instance have two packages libnet0 and libnet1 which just inlucde the 
shared libraries, but their -dev packages are incompatible since they 
share some filenames.
RedHat based distros also have two packages, but they have the same 
filename and are thus incompatible.

So the question is how to proceed here?
Should I create a new package which have its own subdir (like gcc3/gcc4) 
for packages which are compatible with 1.1.x or should I just ignore the 
1.1.x?