Some sort of alternatives support

[jhuntwork]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
There should be a way to support multiple packages that provide the same file or feature. For example, busybox ships with ps utilities that may be fine for some (most?) use cases. But someone may actually want the extended features that come with procps-ng. A similar thing is true for ip tools. The ones in busybox work great for most use cases, but if you want to set up a Wireguard connection, you will probably need some extended features found in iproute2.

Describe the solution you'd like
One possible way to solve this would be to install packages to a package-namespace location, like /mere/[pkgname]. Then, to use it, you either manage your PATH, or have an activate command or trigger that installs symlinks to typical systems locations in the standard PATH. A nice side-benefit of that is that you could install mere packages on a non-mere host and not worry about polluting or interfering with the host system, everything would live in /mere.

A more advanced implementation might be more like what Gobolinux or NixOS do, having version specific paths. There's a lot of potential with that, but also some unique challenges, especially when building, and much more impactful in the way the system runs. Perhaps something to consider with the package manager issue (#381), much further down the line.