alt Hacker NewsAnyone can make a tool that solves a tiny part of the problem. however the reason no such tool has caught on is because of all the weird special cases you need to handle before it can be useful. Even if you limit your support to desktop: OS/X and Windows that problem will be hard, adding various linux flavors is even more difficult, not to mention BSD. The above is the common/mainstream choices, there Haiku is going to be very different, and I've seen dozens of others over the years, some of them have a following in their niche. Then there are people building for embedded - QNX, vxworks, or even no OS just bare metal - each adding weirdness (and implying cross compiling which makes everything harder because your assumptions are always wrong).
I'm sorry I have to be a downer, but the fact is if you can use the word "I" your package manager is obviously not powerful enough for the real world.
I will categorize this as a pattern I've seen which leads to stagnation, or is at least aiming for it. Usually these are built on one or more assumption which doesn't hold. The flow of this pattern:
Anecdotes I'm choosing based on proximity to this particular problem: uv and cargo. uv because people said the same thing about python packaging, and cargo because its adjacent to C and C++ in terms of being a low-level compiled language used for systems programming, embedded/bare-metal etc.The world is rich in complexity, subtlety, and exceptions to categorization. I don't think this should block us from solving problems.