At Netflix, I went down the rabbit hole of package management. We were working on a distributed build system that allowed you to compose immutable builds of ecosystem independent artifacts. After working in that space, and reading the last few decades of LISA papers, I’m fairly confident our industry has gotten package management horribly wrong - and I think your comment cuts right to why.

The two closest build systems I’ve seen to getting it right: Nix (closest) and FreeBSD ports.

I’ll use the i3 window manager as an example. There are plenty of forks of i3 out there (example: adding space between windows, rounded corners, i3bar mods, etc). They’re each packaged and published as separate packages! You can’t compose them even though many of their changes are compatible. This leads to packages like i3-gaps-rounded.

What I really want out of a package manager is “patch support” - where I can publish, discover, share, and consume patches on top of the OSS I use.

Nix gets really close to this. I haven’t invested enough time in learning Nix yet, but it’s on my bucket list. Currently I use FreeBSD and use their ports collection for i3, and put all of my patches in the patch directory there. FreeBSD will apply the patches in order and then build the package for me.

I’m not sure exactly where I’m going with this rant beyond: I wish OSS package management adopted less of a producer-consumer relationship and more of a peer relationship when it comes to source code management and builds.