Often I hear about situations where companies are developing extensable in house software (the dreaded enterprise 'framework') which is supposed to support multiple 'plugins' from diffirent teams. Usually this ends up being a half baked solution that does not really work due to compatibility prolems between addins, or between addins and the framework itself. Usually this means QA have to 'rubber stamp' a global set of versions accross all plugins, or more usually plugins are released and stuff breaks in nasty ways.

This problem has been solved before however, for example the package management systems like apt for debian linux. I suspect that the reason it works is that it is built from the start on a known 'Computer Science-y' concept. My question is what is it?