"Alternative to homebrew (the CLI utility)" -> "Frontend to Homebrew (the package system)".
Along these lines, I wonder when somebody will come up with a "universal package manager" that factors out the dependency resolution, content-addressable store, packing / unpacking, file manipulation, signatures, etc. Small plugins, maybe just declarative descriptions, would suffice to connect it to stores like npm, homebrew, pypi, maybe even cargo and nixpkgs.
I can see how apt may be an "universal package manager" because Debian has everything, in several variations. But it only works a the Debian-style package database.
What I mean saying "universal" is an ability to adapt to any sane package database, among other things.
Bazel (which I had a chance to know also as Blaze) is a might build tool. But can it install a local package for you, the way brew, nix, npm, or apt can? Blaze is famously hermetic.
Along these lines, I wonder when somebody will come up with a "universal package manager" that factors out the dependency resolution, content-addressable store, packing / unpacking, file manipulation, signatures, etc. Small plugins, maybe just declarative descriptions, would suffice to connect it to stores like npm, homebrew, pypi, maybe even cargo and nixpkgs.