Given how many non-obvious but easily-solvable problems there are with package management... this might actually not be a terrible idea. The biggest issue would be making it sufficiently flexible to integrate with anything that wants packages, including things like video game modding platforms and programming languages with in-language namespacing/module/package features.

You mean like this?: http://xkcd.com/1654/

And this. https://xkcd.com/927/

Theoretically, apt-get/rpm can be a package manager of package manager. (e.g use them to install npm/qpm)

that's certainly how I install pip on a new machine

Will the package manager manage itself?

Don't most package managers do that themselves anyway? Like npm and pip seem to. Or are they doing something different behind the scenes.

Zypper, apt, dpkg, pacman, etc. all manage themselves.

It will manage all the package managers that do not manage themselves.

it should be called russell's package manager.

bootstrapping package manager, yes )

package calculus

An Uber for package managers