[teknomage1]

I look at the linux development environment as a sort of primordial soup from which systems rise and fall in an evolutionary dance. t makes Linux this sort of software avatar of choas that can be solidified into a cohesive whole every few months.
I think often it can be solved by choosing a regular upgrade cycle for your working libraries - say until version X of my software is done it will stick to features provided by version Y of some library.
And for big packages like glibc and such, security and bug fixes are almost always ported back to older versions of the software.