[peterwwillis]

Completely misses the real fundamental problem: people make assumptions about their target. Almost all of this discussion is centered around Linux systems. What about Windows? What about Solaris? HPUX? AIX? VMS? Tru64? Plan9? BeOS? Android?

Package management itself is not a solved problem, so you can't very well expect programming languages to be any different. The existing systems work quite well and make total sense: your package manager is tailored to your specific use case. Centralized/decentralized is a red herring. First figure out how to package every single thing for every single system and use case in the world, and then come back to me about organizational systems.

[munificent]

Agree completely. The fundamental problem of package management is the dependencies of the package manager itself.

Every programming language has its own package manager because it's written in that language. No language maintainer is going to say something like, "Hey, want to use Ruby? Just install Perl first so you can install some Ruby packages!"

Likewise, every OS-level package manager assumes an OS. I'm sure apt-get, and yum and Nix are great. I'm also sure their greatness isn't very helpful to Windows users.

There's also the dependency between those two. An OS-level package manager can't easily be written in a high-level language, because one of its core jobs is to install high level languages. A language-level package manager doesn't want to re-invent the OS stack.

Bootstrapping is hard. Package managers sit very very low on the software stack where any dependencies are very difficult to manage and where consolidation is nigh impossible.