Reposted by @ryan.freumh.org
Aye-cfp! ICFP conditional accept!! anil.recoil.org/papers/2026-package… will appear there, subject to (many) sensible corrections suggested by the reviewers. Congrats @ryan 🙂
anil.recoil.org
Package Managers à la Carte: A Formal Model of Dependency Resolution
Package managers are legion. Every programming language and operating system has its own solution, each with subtly different semantics for dependency resolution. This fragmentation prevents multilingual projects from expressing precise dependencies across language ecosystems; it leaves external system and hardware dependencies implicit and unversioned; it obscures security vulnerabilities that lie in the full dependency graph. We present the Package Calculus, a formalism for dependency resolution that unifies the core semantics of diverse package managers. Through a series of formal reductions, we show how this core is expressive enough to model the diversity that real-world package managers employ in their dependency expression languages. By using the Package Calculus as the intermediate representation of dependencies, we enable translation between distinct package managers and resolution across ecosystems.
![Dark-terminal screenshot showing the command caled search --type todo -c Freumh -S summary:desc and the Caledonia to-do list for the CalDAV account “Freumh” in four columns — account name, completion box ([ ] or [x]), task summary, and UUID. Displays a mix of pending and completed items; “Shopping list” has indented sub-items “Myrrh”, “Gold” and “Frankincense”. Other visible entries include “Setting up GrapheneOS”, “Syncthing vault” (completed) and completed items such as “Orgzly”, “Nix”, “Ledger”, “Email”, “CalDAV” and “Banking”.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:3lfhu6ehlynzjgehef6alnvg/bafkreiejnsjfkdoymagepa3a55nwnh6jyp6r6hoxe6vth5t764bou5xb4u)
