[folex]

Yes!

I'm in a team that works on a pet prog lang for distributed systems, and we did some research of using an existing package managing systems. We've settled on NPM for now, but god I wish there would be a better generic package manager out there.

[mijoharas]

Not a generic package manager, but it's probably worth calling out asdf as the generic version manager[0] (maybe you're already aware of it, but it's a generic replacement for nvm, rvm, virtualenv, *vm, which supports any language based on plugins.)

Again, maybe you're already aware of it, but I think it's a nice example of genericising a concern common to many languages which sounds similar to what you're asking for (albeit unfortunately in a slightly different space).

[0] https://github.com/asdf-vm/asdf

[dmix]

At a minimum it's useful having the `.tool-versions` dotfile in a project directory which lists the versions of each language, db, and package manager version (our Rails project lists versions for ruby, bundler, postgres, node, yarn, redis). Even if all devs don't use asdf, it's a useful reference point.

https://asdf-vm.com/manage/configuration.html#tool-versions

Similar to an `.editorconfig` to globally define stuff like tab widths for IDEs.

[pxc]

Check out Denxi. Might be the closest thing to what you're looking for today, and is informed by the state of the art in package management without totally imposing strict discipline on all packages.

https://docs.racket-lang.org/denxi-guide/index.html

[drpyser22]

Did you compare nix to npm? Is there a good comparison out there?