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Recently Billy McCafferty wrote a post on Horn, a package manager that Paul Cowan and Dave the Ninja have developed, similar to the idea of Ruby’s Gem. Although it’s a step in the right direction, it does have issues. To be able to use it, you need to download Horn and build it. But not only that, you also need to install Subversion, Git, Powershell, Rake, PSake, Cake, Fake…and a whole slew of SCM’s and build tools. Why? Because Horn builds from source. As such, it needs to access the SCM a specific project uses, download the files locally and run the build script. Since OSS projects are free to choose what build script they use, that also adds to the complexity. Some are happy with MSBuild, which isn’t normally an issue since it’s part of every .NET install. However, others use Rake, which in turn requires Ruby. You get the picture…