That is, instead of resorting to flatpaks and things of the like, why don’t we expose a way for libraries to express version information dynamically and just have those versions available and the dependant application can check if what it needs is available and just use that?
Good point. It’s something that’s ripe for standardisation.
If there was fewer formats you’d need fewer repos. Therefore fewer servers and fewer human eyes to review everything.
I’ll likely get flamed for this but it would also go part of the way to solving AUR’s woes. Have a threat level rating like 1 for safe, 5 for dangerous. Debian won’t let you install higher than 2 but Arch users can choose whatever level of danger they can handle.