While it may be a sidetrack, and not belong in this discussion, there is an interesting, but seemingly not actively developed, distro named GoboLinux, that has an entirely different approach to solve the package management problem.
It may not be very attractive to some; I seem to remember some early puppy versions with lots of symlinks, and also the eagerness to steer away from that path!Wikipedia wrote:An alternative distribution which redefines the file system hierarchy by installing everything belonging to one application in one folder under /Programs, and using symlinks from /System and its subfolders to point to the proper files.
It may nevertheless be some ideas in GoboLinux worth looking at, the possibility to run several versions of a program simultaneously is quite intriguing, and it provides a solution to running programs based on several different distributions.
More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoboLinux for an overview, and of course http://gobolinux.org/
tallboy