Taxonomy of Package Management in Programming Languages and Operating Systems

Muhammad2019 opens by saying, "Package management is instrumental for programming languages and operating systems, and yet it is neglected by both areas as an implementation detail," to which I can only reply, "Amen." The authors go on to create a simple taxonomy of package management systems with language-agnostic versus language-specific as one axis and filesystem-oriented versus database-oriented as another, then discuss the crucial issue of integration between languages versus integration between package managers. (If you have ever struggled to keep C extensions to Python in sync, you'll share the authors' frustration that package managers don't integrate as cleanly as languages do.)

Reading this paper brought the difficulties package managers face into focus for me, and I will use its taxonomy in the future when teaching. A rational reconstruction like the one in yesterday's paper on build systems would have been helpful; I hope someone will use this paper as a starting point and build something like that.