[inopinatus]

I'd like to take this opportunity to highlight BSDPAN, which is how FreeBSD integrates her own package database with Perl's native module installation.

Since 99% of package management is just files on a filesystem and a bit of dependency analysis, for the purposes of easing installation, permitting bidirectional awareness of state, and alerting administrators to security updates.

I would commend any OS that has the smarts to hook into the package ecosystems of her guests. RubyGems, CPAN, npm, PEAR, PyPI into APT, RPM and what have you. Wouldn't it be great if.

Here's an edge case, though. In the specific world of both Ruby and her fat offspring Rails, the proliferation of versions (and the widespread separation of sysadmins from developers) means that in practice many Ruby applications have the runtime language binaries and package dependencies installed in app-specific or personal home directories, via the likes of rvm. Stick that in your package management pipe and solve it.

[igravious]

I know this is a bit of a me too post but this is something I have thought should exist for years now.

Another benefit this would provide would be that you'd only have to learn one set of incantations rather than forgetting and looking up whatever subsystem it is you're messing with.

For the life of me I don't know why this does not exist yet. I have such a desire for it that I thought long and hard about building something like this myself but balked at the prospect, for yea it is daunting.

There are others as well: LaTeX (TeXLive) has a package system too, and I am sure there are lots more.

[inopinatus]

There are workflow issues to generalising the case. In particular, since this is a devops issue any such solution has to be based on satisfying the needs of developers (e.g. ease of deployment, version specificity), and the needs of admins (ease of patching & audit, dependency management) across a wide variety of packaging mechanisms for both base OS and many language-specific ecosystems.

It's no surprise to me that the unit of deployment, for many sites, is becoming the virtual machine template. Since you don't even need to bother maintaining it; just keep your data separate from your code, rebuild the image when necessary with latest libs & pkgs, and throw away old ones. This is how many PaaS providers are doing things.