There are many situations where we are inclined to produce multiple variants of the same package, with each variant depending on a different set of low-level dependencies. For instance:
We would like to position Conda as a language-agnostic package manager, but at present it maintains a distinct bias towards Python. Given its origins this was expected and, frankly, reasonable. Nevertheless, as we begin to use it to subsume other packaging ecosystems, such as CRAN, NPM, Ruby Gems, etc., we are going to want to overcome this history; and one key challenge is to address naming conflicts across platforms.