Also most daemons should fail binding to a port if multiple ones are installed and they automatically start. So unless they have conflicting files they shouldn't conflict. Instead of conflicting each package that suplies foo-daemon should just spit out an warning message on install saying that there are multiple packages installed that provide foo-daemon and each package that provides foo-daemon must be manually configured to receive predictable usage.
I know at my day job we have development servers that maintain multiple versions of various packages, such as cobol, informix and internally written packages. While these aren't running on Debian or even linux in most cases most of these packages would have unpredictable usage if people didn't change environment variables or config files so they know which one they are using at any one instance. We also have a webserver that has three differemt webservers on it (even though they are all derived from apache.) Raz
