I like that the author calls out the naming overloading, cause when I hear package management I think `pacman winget and apt`
Imo there's an identifiable core common to all of these kinds of package managers, and it's not terribly hard to work out a reasonably good hierarchical ontology. I think OP's greater insight in this section is that internally, every package manager has its own ontology with its own semantics and lexicon:
> Even within a single ecosystem, the naming is contested: is the unit a package, a module, a crate, a distribution? These aren’t synonyms. They encode different assumptions about what gets versioned, what gets published, and what gets installed.
Indeed. It's hard to see why eg. a prog language would need its own package management system.
Separate mechanics from policy. Different groups of software components in a system could have different policies for when to update what, what repositories are allowed etc. But then use the same (1, the system's) package manager to do the work.
I don't disagree that it would be nice if there was more interoperability, but so far I havn't seen anyone even try to tackle the different needs that exist for different users. Heck, we really havn't seen anyone trying to build a cross-language package system yet, and that should be a lot easier than trying to bridge the development-distro chasm.
For example?
Normally with an system package manager you would have a -lib package for using in your own code (or simply required by another package), a -src, and then a package without these suffixes would be some kind of executable binary.
But with npm and pip, I'm never sure whether a package installs binaries or not, and if it does, is it also usable as a library for other code or is it compiled? (Homebrew as you mentioned is source based but typically uses precompiled "bottles" in most cases, I think?) And then there is some stuff that's installed with npm but is not even javascript like font packages for webdev.
The other interesting thing about these language package managers is that they complete eliminate the role of the distribution in packaging a lot of end user software. Which ironically, in the oldest days you would download a source tarball and compile it yourself. So I guess its just a return to that approach but with go or cargo replacing wget and make.