[Chris_Newton]

I think it’s a stretch to call a tool like npm, which currently offers 90,000+ packages, a “small, bespoke, use-case-specific” solution. I’m also fairly sure most people publishing their code via npm’s index aren’t spending “thousands of hours” resolving conflicts with other packages by hand; certainly no-one is manually checking over 4 billion pairwise combinations of those packages to make sure they don’t conflict.

And yet npm remains a useful tool, and mostly it does what it should do: download a bunch of files and stick them somewhere on my disk. The same could be said for gem, pip, Bower, and no doubt many other similar tools. They just all do it a bit differently, which leads to a huge amount of duplicated effort for both the writers/maintainers and the users of these packages.

I’m not arguing for magic or for orders of magnitude more work to be done. I’m just arguing for the work that is mostly being done already to be co-ordinated and consolidated through standardisation. To some extent I’m also arguing for operating systems that include robust tools to navigate the modern software landscape as standard, mainly because installing things with tools like apt has an unfortunate way of assuming there should be one global copy of everything, which is frequently not the case for either development libraries or end user software on modern systems, and because if the OS doesn’t provide good universal package management tools then someone else will immediately invent new tools to fill the gaps and now we are back to having overlapping tools and redundancy again.

[peterwwillis]

Again, nothing you use works without it being designed specifically to work that way. You can't use Visual C++ to build software that was designed for Linux without writing portable abstractions and host targets for both platforms, and it definitely won't work on two different architectures without being designed for the endianess and memory width of each. It's bespoke because it's designed for each use case. It simply will not work on anything it wasn't designed for.

And no, it isn't code publishers that spend thousands of hours resolving broken and incompatible builds, it's release maintainers. Go look at bug lists for CentOS. Look at the test trees for CPAN. It is literally mind numbing how much shit breaks, but it makes total sense when you realize it's all 3rd party software which largely is not designed with each other in mind. Somebody is cleaning it all up to make it work for you, but it sure as shit ain't the software authors.

Once you develop enough things or maintain enough things you'll see how endlessly complex and difficult it all is. But suffice to say that the system we have now is simpler than the alternative you are proposing.

[Chris_Newton]

You can't use Visual C++ to build software that was designed for Linux...

Sure you can. Projects of all scales do this all the time. Have you never heard C described as being portable assembly language?

Unless you are writing low-level, performance-sensitive code for something like an operating system or device driver, usually details like endianness matter only to the extent that they specify external protocols and file formats. I would argue that this sort of detail is normally best encoded/decoded explicitly at the outer layers of an application anyway.

Obviously if you rely on primitive types like int or long in C or C++ having a specific size or endianness, or if you assume that they will be equivalent to some specific external format, you’re probably going to have problems porting your code (and any package containing it) across some platforms.

However, that issue does not contradict what I proposed. It’s perfectly viable — indeed, it’s inevitable — to have packages that are only available on some platforms, or packages which depend on different things across platforms. That’s fine, as long as your packaging system doesn’t assume by default that the same thing works everywhere.

And no, it isn't code publishers that spend thousands of hours resolving broken and incompatible builds, it's release maintainers.

Who is the “release maintainer” who made those jQuery libraries I mentioned in my extended example above play nicely together?

Again, this issue does not contradict what I proposed anyway. In my ideal world, if packages are incompatible or don’t have sufficient dependencies available on a certain platform, you just don’t list them as available for that platform in whatever package index they belong to. Once again, this is no harder than what a bunch of different package management tools do (or fail to do) right now.