That's precisely the point: we already have package managers. Its just 'unfashionable' to use them. What I would do if my language needed package management:

That's precisely the point: we already have package managers. Its just 'unfashionable' to use them. What I would do if my language needed package management: write an abstraction for whatever package managers exist on the platform I'm targeting. So my 'package manager' would just be a smart shell around apt-get, or yum, or whatever. Okay, this looks like an idea ripe for the attention ..