  The management of third-party package dependencies is crucial to most
technology stacks, with package managers acting as brokers to ensure that a
verified package is correctly installed, configured, or removed from an
application. Diversity in technology stacks has led to dozens of package
ecosystems with their own management features. While recent studies have shown
that developers struggle to migrate their dependencies, the common assumption
is that package ecosystems are used without any issue. In this study, we
explore 13 package ecosystems to understand whether their features correlate
with the experience of their users. By studying experience through the
questions that developers ask on the question-and-answer site Stack Overflow,
we find that developer questions are grouped into three themes (i.e., Package
management, Input-Output, and Package Usage). Our preliminary analysis
indicates that specific features are correlated with the user experience. Our
work lays out future directions to investigate the trade-offs involved in
designing the ideal package ecosystem.
