I issue an imperative command to apt-get, and it tries to execute it.
It has no knowledge of why I want foo bar and baz installed, nor can it decide if these 3 programs make sense for what I am trying to do, or if there is a better way to do it (maybe there is a package "bazinga", that can replace the foo-bar-baz stack?).
A goal-aware package manager would look like this:
super-apt "i need the system ready to function as a webserver, with a high availability database and backup capabilities"
> A goal-aware package manager would look like this:
A typical package manager is already goal-aware, like `make`. It's input DSL is far from English, but it's not hard to translate your English sentence into «apache postgress rsync» by matching text to package descriptions.
Package manager requires a solver for dependencies, constraints, and conflicts, which is far from trivial. For example, Fedora(RedHat) switched from in-house solver for yum/dnf to zypper SAT solver (libzypp) developed by SuSE/Ximian/Novell.
Unfortunately, package managers are DSL, not a general purpose language.
Unfortunately, this is not a general-purpose language, but apt + shell is.