There are advantages, yes, not denying that, but it seems vanishingly rare to find a packaging system that doesn't have this problem, and that's frustrating in

There are advantages, yes, not denying that, but it seems vanishingly rare to find a packaging system that doesn't have this problem, and that's frustrating in particular for a programmer when almost every single language you use doesn't have an up-to-date package and winds up requiring an external install that then isn't even necessarily version tracked. And I do wonder at the security implications of that. Some of the more popular languages like Python get semi-regular security updates even on stable branches like Debian's, but then I see stuff like Racket still being on 5.2 which came out in 2011 and I have to wonder how that affects the security profile if some "stable" package you've installed is depending on a scripting language package that still has a vulnerability in it because the package in "stable" hasn't been updated in half a decade.