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With jquery very slowly being phased out you get into more and more situations where library X will run with either jquery or zepto.js (but at least one is required).
No package managers that I can think of however allow you to express dependencies like this. If I was to propose this feature to - say - bower, is there precedent for how it might look?
dpkg / APT has supported this for ages.
There are two mechanisms for this. One is alternate dependencies by simply declaring the dependency like this:
Depends: jquery | zeptojs
You will declare that the package depends on either jquery or zepto.js.
The other mechanism is Virtual Packages. A package can declare that it Provides a virtual package and then other packages can depend on that virtual package.
For example, both the jquery package and the zeptojs package can declare that they provide the jquery-api virtual package, and then your app can depend on jquery-api. This has the added advantage that if in the future a third new JQuery-compatible library appears in the market, only the author of that package has to put a Provides: jquery-api line in his package description. You don't have to change your app and it will just work with the new library.
In your app:
Depends: jquery-api
In JQuery:
Provides: jquery-api
In Zepto.JS:
Provides: jquery-api
In the brand-new yet-to-be-written awesome new JQuery replacement:
Provides: jquery-api
