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This is something Microsoft needs to push instead of the insane MSI stuff. Microsoft really needs an officially sanctioned dependency manager, maybe NuGet. Something with a standardized package format based on _archives_, not _executable installers_.

The Microsoft ecosystem is light years behind OSS in this regard. Heck, CPAN was designed in 1993 and became available in 1997. Truly light years - CPAN predates the dot-com boom.

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The good CPAN times :-) It was a bit of a cumbersome thing to work with as a newbie back then but at least it handled dependencies very well.

In many ways CPAN is still state of the art. It has first-class support for namespacing and mirroring, which appears to still elude most environments' packaging systems.

And I'm saying this as someone that dislikes Perl a lot.

I did some research on CPAN - comparing it to Ruby gems and Python's various packaging solutions...

CPAN is the defacto Perl standard, mirroring and testing built in. With perlbrew, localLib and cpanm, the tooling for Perl is world class. I think Ruby and Python are still catching up here. No doubt they will, but CPAN is an amazing feat of engineering.

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