I see where you're coming from, but I think there's a place for these, even though I wish there was a unified solution. I do like the "isolated" package manage

I see where you're coming from, but I think there's a place for these, even though I wish there was a unified solution. I do like the "isolated" package management these systems offer, and would like to see a good way for user-level packaging to be managed in a more universal way. It's extremely useful to be able to deploy multiple isolated environments, with conflicting dependencies, on the same server and not affect the system libraries in any way. Say I need libfoo1.1 that conflicts with the system version for project A, and when related project B rolls around, it needs libfoo2.0 in the same system. Do I build a series of _project_A.deb and _project_B.deb packages, with separate install prefixes, and rebuild their associated dependencies in turn? Large deployments are often very complex systems, and being able to decouple individual environments is a huge improvement.