Mixing package managers - is there any way to make it work?

[danielittlewood]

I am trying very hard to avoid using more than one package manager. The basic reason is that I want to be able to seriously understand what's running on my machine, and if I have N package managers operating in parallel then I have N times as much work to comprehend them all (and god help if they are not independent).

The difficulty I'm having is that there are so many different language-specific managers that get added all the time. There are the famous ones, like pip and npm, but then there are much more obscure ones - choco, pipx, etc. Occasionally I want to install a package built with one of these tools. If I want portage to track all my software, am I forced to write an ebuild for that package and each of its dependencies?

The only advice I could find on the wiki was "Decide which package manager will work best for the use case". I don't think that tells me anything.

Is there any, even imaginary pie-in-the-sky, approach for dealing with this? Maybe some kind of API that package managers adhere to, which allows them to delegate control between each other? If you had two totally disconnected dependency trees, then manager A could handle one tree and B could handle the other. Obviously if the trees overlap, then you run the risk of clashes, but I'm optimistic that those clashes could be resolved (possibly with a lot of difficulty).
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With man it is impossible, but with gcc all things are possible.

[eccerr0r]

Every package manager has its own way of tracking dependencies - Unless they generate the same data, they are incompatible with each other... and this will explain all your questions.

Main problem that package managers need to deal with is all the intricacies as well as the range of versions they are compatible with. What each package provides is another issue as well as special flags... like USE flags.

Also a lot of package managers are specific to a specific language. I don't even know if pip will deal with cargo files, etc. so it gets real bad real fast.
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Intel Core i7 2700K/Radeon R7 250/24GB DDR3/256GB SSD
What am I supposed watching?

[spica]

If you write code, you need to stick to a set of specific dependencies for your project. Gentoo's portage will not work in this case.
Ruby - rbenv, rvm
NodeJS - nvm
Python - pyenv, virtualenv
Docker - dvm (not sure people use this)
and so on.

Deps are installed in home dir, you can easily switch between interpreter versions/dependency sets. This is how programmers do.

[danielittlewood]

[fedeliallalinea]