I don't know about "widely adopted", but we do have a common language for expressing how to build/install/test software across Linux, Unix, Windows and OS X: h

I don't know about "widely adopted", but we do have a common language for expressing how to build/install/test software across Linux, Unix, Windows and OS X: http://0install.net/interface-spec.html http://0install.net/interface-spec.html The tools to read this are in most Linux distribution repositories already (usually under the name "zeroinstall-injector"), and do dependency resolution, conflict resolution (via a SAT solver), GPG signature checking, etc. And each package unpacks to its own directory, so they don't interfere with system packages.