Oh … thx for the insight, it was a daydream anyways looks like the only solution is cloud native if one wants uniformity, still a bit hesitant to have a system so stable I can’t change it’s core filesystem.
OK maybe what I meant was a packaging format and not a package manager, above there was a user that mentioned that all distros have their quirks and kinks, if GNU created a package manager that worked perfectly at first time maybe it’s adoption would go across the distros but as u said to make it perfect the first time is something hard and even harder on early days where nothing was set on stone and there would be always the odd one that would make their package manager.
But if we all agreed early on, one one packaging format (which of course would have to go through many iterations to reach a stable state ) all package format wars would be over and in well implemented ecosystem of package managers of each distro, it would be also an somewhat interoperable one.
Yeah of course I get your argument although we have rpm (or deb in debain based distros) across redHat and OpenSUSE it does not mean that the same rpm package would work on both systems due to distro specific aspects (like different root structures, init systems etc . . .), but that’s something for the package manager to solve, the package format could be agreed upon, which would ease the workload of developers and maintainers since the moment you know the target distros of a package they could see the base differences of said distros and add symlinks, dependencies, environment variables, services … as needed for the package.
This seems like it could lead to a whole lotta of conflicts, but I think if the daddy distros were designed all with one package format in mind, such format could be somewhat interoperable.