Software projects produce artifacts—a concept less particular than package which has a version, manifest and structure conforming to some package system. Package systems are smart, and thus complex. The key feature of an artifact is that it is dumb. Package management is a hard problem, with lots of half-broken systems serving particular ecosystems: Cargo for Rust, pip for Python, NPM for node.js, Maven for Java. Artifact systems are not so well-studied, though the concept is high-leverage:...
