I sincerely doubt porting that to other platforms would be very easy, but perhaps you and I have different definitions of "pain." :)
Plus, you'd have to worry about minor-yet-annoying namespace issues (e.g., a Python package and a non-Python package sharing a name).
Am I the only one not offended by the idea of package managers for each programming language? They always work better when they're tailored to the language.
> Am I the only one not offended by the idea of package managers for each programming language?
Learning multiple tools to do a similar job is a bit of a nuisance. If you know one tool, you can learn its details over time. That's much harder with multiple tools. Does tool X remove configuration files when uninstalling? Can it even uninstall? Do I need to update some configuration files manually?
There's also the part where you sometimes need integration with packages from other package manager systems. System libraries (libcurl, etc.), header files if it gets compiled at install time, make, a compiler, etc.
But since the problem is getting solved by multiple tools already (cpan, pear, apt, yum, just plain ./configure+make, etc.), maybe we should work more on integrating those package managers and less on replacing the others. It seems unlikely to happen with so many incompatible personal preferences around...
There are cases when they don't work better. It happens when your non-python program requires something from python for scripting, or when a python module requires a 'classic' library. A global system is quite good in those cases.
I'm not sure what you mean by the namespace issues. Everything that's installed as a python package in debian is prefixed with "python-"...
About the porting and the pain: I believe the hard parts are defining the metadata, and refining the actual program logic. In my experience over the last decade, 'synaptic' has been the most trouble-free system to use.
I think it would be less work to clone/port the needed logic bits to Windows/whatever, and share most of the metadata defined for Debian/Ubuntu/etc, instead of redoing (and debugging) everything from scratch.
Plus, you'd have to worry about minor-yet-annoying namespace issues (e.g., a Python package and a non-Python package sharing a name).
Am I the only one not offended by the idea of package managers for each programming language? They always work better when they're tailored to the language.