[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.