SOLUTION: because p2 cannot do it for you, you must uninstall the offending features before attempting to update them. Simple. To solve the bpel conflict, you have to install the bpel SDK on top of the existing bpel SDK. You cannot simply update the runtime w/o updating the SDK feature. This is p2 being p2 and there's nothing that we can do from the release side of things to fix this. Alternatively, uninstall the existing BPEL SDK feature, then install the new BPEL runtime feature. To solve the jbpm issue, uninstall the old jbpm features before installing the new version. This problem arises because of the way the features are encoded to not permit 4.3 to be a valid update for 4.0, and the fragile dependency of jbpm3 and jbpm4 on their jbpm.common feature.