This is a stupid question asked by a person with no technical experience and very little understanding of linux.
Why is there not a time released multiplatform package manager.
If you look through the board you will see lots of problems such as this one , this one , this one , this one ,this one ,this one , and this one.
I have only used Mandrake 9.2 -10.1 and Fedora 2-3, but with both I have ran into the same problem. I try to install some new piece of software, but it requires a dependency. So I try to install the dependency but it conflicts with some other library. I try to remove the library but doing that causes many other programs to lose be removed. This recently happened to me while I was trying to install Juk, I ended up having to remove Xine and Mplayer and everything that was depended on them in order to get a library installed. Then I had to reinstall Xine and Mplayer, then install Juk. I'm not asking for help with that problem because I got it all worked out, but what should have been a 10 sec. job using urpmi turned into a half hour ordeal. Some package confliction problem has happened with every distro I have ever used.
So my suggestion/question is why don't we use Zero-Install or autopackage to create a distro neutral time released package manager. What I mean is we release a set of core libraries like gcc, xml, flac, and whaterver else the developers think is important. Then only the programs that can be built using those core files would be put in that package list. Then every 18-24 months or so that core gets updated. It wouldn't be very cutting edge, but if it became popular it would hopefully become so that it had a fairly complete list of programs and it would be easier.
I think something like this would have side benefits. One would be that it would help new distro's get started. Right now a Distro requires a large number of people to package rpms for it. This becomes a chicken and egg problem as rpm's are needed for popularity and popularity is needed to get people to make rpm's.
It also might help bring some conformity to distros. If the service gets popular no distro would want to become incompatiable with it. This would create stability for developers.
Again I have no idea what I am taking about, but it seems to me a service like this is needed by Linux. And it also seems like it would be easy to do. Even a novice user can make a .package

Sorry for the length of this post.

What you have to realise is this: With the insane amount of distros avaialble, this is impossible, and hence why Slackware doesn't use dependency resolution.
You have Mandrake, Fedora, SuSE, etc using RPMs
Slackware uses TGZs
Debian uses DEBs
Gentoo just compiles EVERYTHING

Having a set strict of libraries also forces everyone to usethe same thing, which is exactly the opposite of what Linux is about. People could no longer use development trees, thus no beta testing. How's that for "stability for developers".

If you want real compatibility between packages, you need to compile from source. Run the most updated libraries, and you should not have (many) problems. I say many because there may, repeat may (I've never experienced it), be problems with legacy software.

Ikar - yes, that is perfectly possible and sensible. In fact it's likely to happen within the next year or two.

FWIW I am the developer of autopackage, and the platform/base set idea is one we've been kicking around for a long time. Most distro developers do believe it's a good plan but we've all been waiting for the LSB, yet they still do nothing.

Most likely if nothing has happened a year from now, I and a few others will put together specifications for such a thing. People *are* working on this problem.