Paket: Package manager for .NET and Mono (opens in new tab)

I hate to be a Negative Nancy, but wouldn't it be easier to Just Fix NuGet? I don't think that any of the problems being solved here are fundamentally incompatible with being fixed in NuGet (though I could be wrong).

    How to get Paket

    Paket is available on NuGet. To install the tool, run the following command in the Package Manager Console:
    PM> Install-Package Paket

Oh no, don't give us another Python easyinstall mess; you need a package manager to get another package manager to get a third package manager. Well, at least it's not called "easy install" because that's exactly what it's not unless you already have everything installed. The whole purpose of a package manager is to avoid dependency mess and instead we get another 2 links in the chain that has to be installed manually.

My answer to the main question in the faq, "Why do I need Paket instead of nuget?" (my paraphrase) is this: meh. NuGet's behavior simply doesn't cause me that many problems, and when it's a superbigdeal I can just get a git submodule and be on my merry way. The one killer feature I want is an easy way to convert a downloaded NuGet package into a folder of the latest sources.

And hey: NuGet is open-source.

The front page doesn't answer THE question, why would I use Paket instead of NuGet. Realistically in the .NET ecosystem, once Microsoft introduces a passable product (such as NuGet) the chances of any alternative to gain adoption are veeery swim.

If you want to add a killer feature to this, add better handling for non-referenced dependencies. By non-referenced I mean they don't exist as a project reference like a dll would. For example, if you're doing a web project and you depend on say angular. Angular isn't added as a project reference. Nuget/Visual Studio do all kinds of oddities to work around this. Unless there is already a solution to this that I don't know about (besides using two different package managers).

How does this differ from asp.vnext's kpm?

One thing I wish NuGet would do - let me download packages directly from Github, like Bower and Grunt do. I do use Bower and Grunt with ASP.NET but usually mixed with some NuGet packages. It would be nice to have one system for all.