Just out of curiosity, how feasible do you think it might be to give up on the overwhelmingly complex task of making all 3rd party software installation compatible, and instead make linux userland be able to install multiple incompatible packages (heck, be able to install both rpms and debs for that matter) in multiple "virtual roots"? It seems like adding a tree structure to the dynamic linker and the ldconfig database could get most of this, so programs loaded from the /alt/debian/usr/bin directory would first load shared libs pointed at by the /alt/debian/etc/ldconfig then fall back to /etc/ldconfig (just as a hypothetical example). Aside from allowing essentially any packages from any linux distribution or repo to be loaded on one system, this same technique could reduce the mind-shattering nonsense that is the current multilib support for 32 and 64 bit by simply taking the same approach to divide the system into 32 and 64 bit roots. Just a wild idea, but I wonder what people think?
