I highly recommend reading over some of the Nix papers -- what the author is doing is totally divergent from nearly every other package manager in a way that's

I highly recommend reading over some of the Nix papers -- what the author is doing is totally divergent from nearly every other package manager in a way that's either insane or brilliant (I don't personally know enough to judge). I saw his talk at a software upgrades workshop, and it was pretty impressive.