zeroinstall and click are interesting. But zeroinstall doesn't do anything on the security front. Click is rather confusing, I haven't found a webpage for it yet, or any information about how to like install and use a click package on Debian(I think that this is because it's not possible/supported). However, I don't see nix or redhats various efforts(they have annoced a new universal package format every year or two for a decade now) to be very serious. The problem with these efforts is that they always want to impose some opinion on HOW things should be packaged. And I don't think that is useful as a global standard.

you should really kickstarter this project if you are really serious. I think this can really be something if pushed hard. For all its hate, systemd is a one man effort that changed Linux. And so was git.

There are people out there who would love to financially support this if you ask and have a good sense of what you want to do. IMHO your post above (about zeroinstall and click) are jumping the gun.

Would love to see what you come up with.. once the excitement has died down ;)

I keep wondering how much traction systemd would have gotten without having a long standing project like udev latched onto it (never mind the consolekit replacement logind).

I'm just waiting for some project to be wholly dependent on the existence of networkd or some such...