...similar to spack... Isn't this effectively equivalent to version-controlling a shell script that contains a set of 'curls' or 'clones'? What I had in mind

...similar to spack... Isn't this effectively equivalent to version-controlling a shell script that contains a set of 'curls' or 'clones'? What I had in mind would be more invisible and self-contained within the VCS. It would effectively be a meta-VCS.