NGPM - Next Generation Package Manager

Coming... maybe never?

There's a set of ideas here, but development effort hasn't happened. I keep thinking I might want to make it some day, so maybe eventually I will. Or maybe not. Time will tell.

If I ever do, the aim is some sort of hybrid of the best of npm, brew, apt-get, yum, nix, {mac,{free,open}bsd}ports, portage, gem, rvm, pip, quicklisp, rvm, go get, and, perhaps especially (though probably also least likely to be known by folks) inst and swmgr. With maybe some sort of app store kind of thing mixed in a little bit, too? But probably geared heavily towards (and perhaps even exclusively using) free (as in liberty) software. (Certainly NGPM itself would be free. Probably it would be usable for installation of non-free software, but perhaps any official package repository would not accept non-free packages. So there'd be other publicly-accessible repos with non-free software, and maybe lots of folks would use them, and that's a thing that can happen, because that's a freedom too, in a way, but even though the development of NGPM is in no way connected to the FSF or the GNU project, its developers are aligned with the philosophy that freedom in software is important.)

Who knows, it might even involve (the option of) a whole GNU/Linux (and/or FreeBSD, and/or others?) distribution based on it. Not to mention an ability to spin Docker images, Vagrant boxes, etc.

I dream big. Will I ever bring it to reality? Probably not. But at least I dreamt it.

(In the mean time, there are, of course, other available options. I just haven't met one of them that I've loved. Or even liked particularly much since inst, and even inst had some problems. Not like RPM does/did (it was my hatred for RPM when I compared it to inst that originally inspired this idea, years and years ago (decades ago, now, I suppose).)