This document is a sketch, a draft, a brain-dump, an initialization of a project I hope to some day have the time and energy to finish.

All of this of course implemented in gale :)

^ includes package definitions, perhaps use an ffi-codegen hack within the compiler to "compile to" apks?

Use APK file format from Alpine, or at least some fork thereof. For that matter, use apk-tools or a white-room non-GPL implementation thereof, because it's a beast of a package manager.

USE flags are a great idea from Portage (and somewhat XBPS), use them! You know what else Portage did right? Atoms: dev-lang/python-3.12-r1.

System always tries to have exactly one copy of everything installed. python3.12 +sqlite +tk fulfills python3 +sqlite. This implies our solver has to be extremely permissive, and of course must also solve on multiple axes: not just versions, but also USE flags. Portage is probably a great source of inspiration here, but their code is GPL, and so we'll have to come up with everything on our own.

Desktops are primary target. If you make it easy on a desktop/laptop, servers should fall right in line.

Encrypted rootfs should be a first-class citizen.

Automatic creation and updates (only when safe) of filesystems given a partition layout???