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Comment by vbernat | Hacker News Reader

That's hardly related to a package manager. You can for example run Debian unstable to get more up-to-date stuff or mix Debian Jessie with backports. Same package manager, different sources.

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I think the whole point of OP is to have completely separate installs (e.g. system apps installed in one root and user apps in another). If you go installing latest apps from different sources/repos, you're bound to face conflicts with the system packages. E.g. while installing packages with CPAN or pip, it is really easy to cause conflicts with the system Perl or Python, respectively. Right now there are lots of varying solutions to address this such as virtualenvs and docker images. These are fine for developers, but generally not acceptable to consumers.

It would be nice to have a safe consistent experience, a generic user-mode package manager.

FWIW, it's generally a bad idea to mix in testing and unstable in a stable system (or even just testing). My recommendation is to run stable along with backports (if needed) -- and use something like schroot[1] for running persistent (separate) sessions under testing, unstable etc.

Schroot essentially wraps up debootstrap and chroot along with mounting /proc etc, and (optionally) bind-mounting /home (which among other things gives access to x11 session cookies, for sharing one xorg display -- so one could run firefox, gimp or mplayr from an unstable-chroot on a stable system). Overall, with SSD prices dropping as sizes are increasing -- it might be better to simply use vms (one of the nice (potential) things about rkt -- the ability to run a "container" under kvm, turning it into a vm).

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/Schroot

What I'm suggesting is a decoupling between system package managers and application image managers (which should run across distributions/versions).

Edit: thinking about it, this should also be the perfect opportunity for a cross-distribution app store/center.

Thanks for mentioning this. I have been running unstable for many years and when people ask I simply tell them that it's like running latest Ubuntu except i can stay with my favorite Debian.

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