I guess my hope is that rather than requiring a bunch of hardcoded boilerplate for each package management solution, we could come up with a reasonable set of p

I guess my hope is that rather than requiring a bunch of hardcoded boilerplate for each package management solution, we could come up with a reasonable set of primitives that they'd all need and then find a way to express them agnostically. The power of LLVM and LSP are that it's not just one entity producing all of the implementations, but that each side of the communication can contribute the stuff that's specific to their use case so that no one else needs to worry about those internal details. If I write a new programming language, all I need to do is implement a language server client, and then everyone can get plugins for pretty much any editor they want without needing to do a huge amount of work. It's possible something like this exists for package management right now, but my current impression is that the only products that try to provide something like this would not be as easily extensible to adding new distro package formats that might be invented but instead hardcode a few of the most common types (debian, rpm, etc.). The key part that seems to be missing is a standard for what the bits in the middle should look like; what's the package-level equivalent to LLVM IR or the LSP?