On: Phil Hagelberg on Emacs new package manager.

[bkudria]

This sort of "integration" is enormously difficult. In fact, it's even ill-defined.

I challenge you to design a useful system that works, but is general enough to integrate both dpkg and rpm.

[jwhitlark → bkudria]

Puppet. I'm increasingly convinced that a multilevel system is required to solve this type of problem.

[regularfry → jwhitlark]

I agree. I think we need a protocol which is both package manager (dpkg, rpm) and environment (emacs, python, ruby) agnostic, with plugins to handle the specific cases.

I think the starting point should be an RVM/perlbrew-alike for each environment; that'll keep the environment developers and those who like to be on the bleeding-edge happy. Then plugins to handle {gem,elpa,pip,...} -> (sufficiently general intermediate format) -> {deb,rpm,msi,...}, and we're done.

Seemples.