1.3 Terminology

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Terms defined in PSPU §5.2 — package, manifest, files manifest, payload, repository, descriptor, index, virtual name, role, claim, holder, installation root, trust anchor — carry the same meaning here and are not redefined.

Terms specific to the implementation:

  • Transaction — the atomic unit of work. Every install, upgrade, uninstall, grant, and revoke executes within one, even when it contains a single operation.

  • Plan — the resolver's output: an ordered list of operations that, applied to the installed set, satisfies the request. A plan is computed entirely from index data, before anything is fetched.

  • Goal (or target) — one requested operation the operator named: install this, upgrade that, remove the other.

  • Candidate — an available package, drawn from a repository index, that the resolver may select.

  • World — the resolver's working model, keyed by (name, root): every installed package plus every operation in flight.

  • Journal — the record of a transaction's intent, stored as rows in the package database. It carries the backup map: for each displaced file, the sibling path its original was renamed to.

  • Staged file — a file written to a temporary sibling of its destination, within the same directory, before the transaction commits. Nothing appears at a final install path until the apply phase.

  • Backup — a displaced original, renamed aside within its own directory. Backups cost no additional disk space and are produced by a single rename.

  • Authorization — a resolver output demanding an explicit, action-specific act from the operator before the plan may be applied. Distinct from a notice, which is informational and never blocks.

  • Adoption — recording an existing unowned file as owned by an installing package, without rewriting it, when its content already matches what would have been installed.

  • Side effect — one of the three standard maintenance operations a package may declare (PSPU §5.24).

  • Recipe — a pekit.toml file plus its build script: the input to the producer toolchain describing how to turn an upstream source tree into one or more packages.

  • Lock (in composition) — the pinned, resolved closure an image composition records, so that the same inputs produce the same image. Not to be confused with the transaction lock, which is a mutual exclusion primitive.

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