But this is my point: We are already solving all of those problems, and doing almost all of the work I suggested.

All of the main package managers recognise versions and dependencies in some form. Of course the model might not be perfect, but within the scope of each set of packages, it is demonstrably useful, because many of us are using it every day.

All of the people contributing packages to centralised package repositories for use with npm and gem and pip and friends are already using version control and they are already adding files to their projects to specify the dependencies for the package manager used to install their project — or in many cases, for multiple package managers, so the project can be installed multiple different ways, which is effectively just duplicated effort for no real benefit.

All major operating systems already come with some form of package management, though to me this is the biggest weak point at the moment. There are varying degrees of openness to third parties, and there is essentially no common ground across platforms except where a few related *nix distributions can use the same package format.

All major operating systems also support virtualisation to varying degrees, though again there is plenty of scope for improvement. I’ve suggested before that it would be in the interests of those building operating systems to make this kind of isolation routine for other reasons as well. However, even if full virtual machine level isolation if too heavyweight for convenient use today, usually it suffices to install the contents of packages locally within a given location in the file system and to set up any environment accordingly, and again numerous package managers already do these things in their own ways.

There is no need for multi-year ISO standardisation processes, and there is no need to have everything in the universe work the same way. We’re talking about tools that walk a simple graph structure, download some files, and put them somewhere on a disk, a process I could have done manually for the project I described before in about 10 minutes. A simple, consolidated version of the best tools we have today would already be sufficient to solve many real world problems, and it would provide a much better foundation for solving any harder problems later, and it would be in the interests of just about everyone to move to such a consolidated, standardised model.