I'm working on a project to break up our ball of mud. I'd like to introduce the notion of versioned APIs for packages (essentially different versions of a given package) using semantic versioning (semver.org). My goal is to allow for a structure like: 
MyPackage
   use YourPackage version 1.0.3;
   use OtherPackage version 2.5.6;

YourPackage
   use OtherPackage version 3.2.1

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Essentially, I don't care what version of OtherPackage YourPackage uses, I only care that the version of YourPackage that I'm using is supported.

Our development team has gotten quite large (well over 200 folks), and trying to synchronize API changes across 5 different timezones and hundreds of developers is a pain. Having some way to allow devs to continue to use older versions of a package, while allowing package maintainers to move forward (i.e. break APIs) without having to worry about breaking everyone else would be fantastic. Obviously there would be a lifecycle, we would deprecate older versions of the packages as needed (and uplift the packages using the deprecated version etc).

Edit: Ideally I'd like this to be mostly on the packaging side. I'd like to avoid littering piles of conditionals in code to handle the versioning. i.e. none of ...

if(some_version){
   do this;
}
elsif(some other version)  {
   do this other thing;
}

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In reply to Multiple package versions by amw1

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