I've been thinking about related issues. Probably the first cut will be an "app bundle" format for Oil + busybox + arbitrary user utilities. I'm more interest

I've been thinking about related issues. Probably the first cut will be an "app bundle" format for Oil + busybox + arbitrary user utilities. I'm more interested in the subset of busybox that is PORTABLE. busybox doesn't run on BSDs, because a lot of it is tied to the Linux kernel. It's more for embedded Linux. I actually worked on the toybox project around when starting Oil (toybox is the "busybox" on Android, started by the former busybox maintainer Rob Landley.) So I don't want to necessarily create another package manager, which is sort of implied by your question (?). For shell, the package manager is traditionally the system one -- "apt-get" on Debian, maybe homebrew on Mac, etc. But I definitely want to solve the dependency problem, and I think the best way to do that is through some kind of support for app bundles. Of course you can also create a container image if you like.