[davexunit]

Package management needs to be solved at the systems level. Rather than having a new package manager for every language and every extensible program, the problems that make our systems package manager (apt, yum, etc) unsuitable for the task need to be addressed. The biggest problems to me are unprivileged package management (no sudo) and support for multiple "profiles" (think virtualenv, rvm, gemsets). Projects such as GNU Guix or Nix solve the problems quite nicely, IMO. We should develop them more instead of inventing more special-purpose package managers.

[randallsquared]

Package management at the systems level is a completely different problem from package management at the application level. An externally-facing server application is ideally a self-contained system of its own which should be installable on any modern kind of system without regard to whatever is or isn't on that system already, beyond the bare minimum. Trying to resolve library dependencies between two externally-facing applications is pointless; there should be no effect of one on the other.

In the days when space and bandwidth was expensive, a lot of compromises had to be made, but with many current language ecosystems, the cost of maintaining separate infrastructure is trivial, so we shouldn't be continuing to make our lives more difficult by deferring to the system package manager.

The sibling comment brings up Nix, but the only reason that looks like a good solution is that it happens to make all libraries application-specific libraries (if I understand correctly), which fuses the two problem domains. Nix excepted, however, I think it's a mistake to conflate them.

[ForHackernews]

Ugh. I think there's a lot of sense in this comment, but it still seems horrendously wasteful to install multiple, redundant versions of libraries just to maintain separation between applications.

Hell, space and bandwidth are cheap: Let's just distribute all of our applications as 2 GB binary VM images.

[cwyers]

"Projects such as GNU Guix or Nix solve the problems quite nicely, IMO."

So long as you define the problem space as "package management for POSIX systems," and in the case of Guix you can scratch OS X and I think the BSDs off the list, too. If your package manager doesn't run on all of Windows, Linux and OS X at a bare minimum then your package manager is not solving the problems of Node.js, Python, PHP, Perl, Ruby or any other cross-platform runtime.

[davexunit]

Sigh. Well fine, if you're stuck on Windows then language-specific package managers are much better than nothing. But on POSIX systems, we can do so much better than the current mess.