Some references

Writing an article without pointer is pointless. So here is a start.

Version dependencies are described here http://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ch-relationships.html

For a functional dependency specification (Nix and NixOS) see

• the paper of Eelco Dolstra http://www.cs.uu.nl/~eelco/pubs/nspfssd-lisa2004-final.pdf
• the developers manual http://nix.cs.uu.nl/dist/nix/nix-0.11/manual/#chap-package-management
• the project homepage http://nix.cs.uu.nl/nixos/index.html

Also the RPM specifications are useful but last time I looked it was not so complete as debian.
Nix is really nice but not easy or never to re-implement.