Why are Spring libraries including same parent packages made seperate?

Question

I've just noticed two different libraries sharing paths. Example is as follows. There are two seperate packages - spring-boot-actuator, spring-boot-actuator-autoconfigure.

Packages included in these libraries share the same parent package or package path. I can't imagine the things under the hood. Wouldn't this lead to linking errors?

Answer 1

Package a.b.c is different from a.b.c.d, there is no hierarchical relationship between any two packages in Java, as we may assume.