System level package management falls quite short of what you want for applications in a lot of ways still. Different apps will want to specify and build again

System level package management falls quite short of what you want for applications in a lot of ways still. Different apps will want to specify and build against extremely specific and different versions of their dependencies, and developers will want to be able to change these versions without lots of organizational coordination between owners of dev/CI/stage/production environments. Currently, this is solved by things like npm/bower/bundler/composer/maven/etc. etc. The code repository describes all the dependencies and they get installed just for that app, testing and deployment process simply incorporate the app's packaging tools. However, for any dependencies which use native extensions, you tend to need to be able to compile those - across all your environments - which means having working toolchain everywhere. Not that this is strange or hard in my opinion, but it seems to discourage people somehow.