Yum-like emacs package manager?

[Tory S. Anderson]

Recently I've read various articles complaining about the emacs package manager 
(packages.el, `list-packages') given the explosion in user contributions to 
places like MELPA. Sure enough, especially with emacs traditional async 
incapabilities, loading the package list and searching through it is very 
cumbersome. 

It seems like a natural solution would be something like apt-get, yum, and 
YaST, or maybe even cpan or ctan. Clearly much of what those managers do is 
unnecessary; we aren't dealing with a full OS, as much as we sometimes pretend 
we are. But in particular they perform search and filtering in powerful and 
relatively fast ways that would be wonderful to have in emacs.

Does anyone know if there's something along these lines in development right 
now?