That's all fine and well but the thing is - Is it possible to unify package management un-intrusively or not? Call the un-intrusive path A nd the intrusive pat

That's all fine and well but the thing is - Is it possible to unify package management un-intrusively or not? Call the un-intrusive path A nd the intrusive path B. A) If we were to to it in such a way that did not require us to modify all the existing package managers out there then how do we do that? I think the solutions (a database of unique hashes and so on) you are coming up with might be a way forward. But don't we still have the problem of communicating with the underlying package managers? B) What sort of intrusion? Would package managers have to adhere to some kind of standard or API or expose a minimum amount of surface area? How would you get package manager maintainers to sign up to something like that? A summit? Who would fund such a summit? Then we'd still need something to implement that API. Somebody elsewhere mentioned PackageKit, would this fit the bill? If not, is there something else that would? And would we still need to track installs and so on with something like what you're proposing. Remember this would ideally would on Debian-like (.deb apt-get) and RPM-like (.rpm yum) and Gentoo (.pkg emerge) and so on and so forth ad nauseum ... I mean, I'm running Ubuntu so after the Great Request for the Unification of Managing Packages Summit (GRUMPS) I want to still be using Synaptic but I want to be able drill down into sub-package managers. See what I mean?