And gentoo has /var/lib/portage/world, and pacman has "pacman -Qe", and apt has "apt-mark showmanual".

...I sometimes wonder how the world would be if the "explicitly installed packages" functionality was better exposed and advertised. I never see any guide for "installing development dependencies" use things like "pacman -S --asdeps" so you can clean them up later.

Thank you 'apt-mark showmanual' is useful. Even better using synaptic you can the click the `Installed (manual)` status filter.

Still not as good as something like npm's `package.json` where it's a human edited list of packages you want installed and it's in the order that you added them in (if you ran `npm install $package-name`). Which is nice when you want to remove one you don't need anymore.

I wonder if it's possible hack a declarative package manger into a Debian system. Like a wrapper around apt that can do all of this.

nixpkgs is (and has been for many years) the largest and most up to date package set by a very large margin.

source: https://repology.org/

i know, just was responding to the mention of maturity in the parent

Nix respiratory has a lot of good work done in it but I've found some bad packages.

Alpine also sounds like a nice system but I'd bet it has an even worse issue with bad packages because of musl.