very technical and verbose specification of things

Several of us on #win32 had been speaking very vaguely, so I was trying to break the problem down so individual parts could be addressed discretely. Mea culpa.

I'll add just a few notes in response. I appreciate the thought you've put into it. I definitely need someone with your kind of compiler-fu. As I start taking this towards a proof-of-concept, I'll certainly want to get more of your input.

What you call Alien::Base is conceptually what my distributions have as inc::Alien::Util

Yes, though it would also include tools for interrogating a system to determine if external dependencies were already satisfied or for getting metadata about installed external dependencies.

The "PAL" files are to me just a special case of make dist

It was intended generically. It could be PPM's in the end, or it could be zip/tgz files. I didn't want presuppose a particular solution.