Versioning packages for breaking upgrades

Yeah. In between. As in, things might be somewhat broken while you're developing the Next Great Release, but when you're ready to burn another Stable (which in Debian is supposed to mean "when they migrate to Testing" but obviously doesn't always) they're back to being unbroken.

This stuff needs to be discoverable. Either you get a "do you want/need the full version" prompt on upgrade (which is what the maintainer seems to be planning), or a "hey you'll need the bells-and-whistles version for this" message when you try using a feature that's now only in -full (which requires support from upstream).

"Read the NEWS files" isn't that helpful when a distribution has a heap of packages with more-or-less-breaking changes, 90% of which don't apply to me and/or I could care less about. Keep in mind that the NEWS's audience is developers and sysadmins as well as "users" (who when they don't admin their own computers don't even get to read the NEWS files, and if they do the info/chaff ratio is even worse).