@samgai I would very much like for a unified package management system to exist. The closest thing to that currently are Nix/Guix, and only barely (they can abstract over other dependency systems but still require a lot of wrangling to make that work).

Basically every other distro package manager is a no-go because it cannot reliably handle transitive dependency conflicts or multi-source installations.

Forcibly flat dependency structures just do not work in practice, and have strong negative externalities (eg. incentivizing heavily monolithic tightly-coupled dependencies and lockstep versioning, among others).

I also find the policy of "a sanctioned dependency set provided by the distro" to be completely outdated and unrealistic to work with. Any unified dependency system *must* support dependencies from arbitrary sources to actually work. The distro approach does not scale.

For a unified dependency system to actually work, it must provide mechanisms but not policy, and Just Work even with complex dependency trees where you cannot guarantee uniqueness or transitive compatibility.

(This whole thing has been a pet peeve of mine for the past decade and I get really annoyed by people defending very obviously broken systems in this area because "well, that's how it's always been")