1.2 What This Manual Covers
This manual describes peipkg as it is built: the package manager, the producer toolchain that feeds it, the image composer that shares its machinery, and the repository publisher.
1.2.1 Covered here #
- The programs and where their state lives (chapter 2)
- Repository configuration, trust, and refresh (chapter 3)
- Dependency resolution: satisfaction, candidate selection, and failure (chapter 4)
- Installation: validation, staging, extraction, and registration (chapter 5)
- Upgrade and removal, and how configuration files survive them (chapter 6)
- Transactions: the lock, the journal, the commit, and crash recovery (chapter 7)
- Rollback and recovery from an interrupted or failed operation (chapter 8)
- Roles and claims (chapter 9)
- Installation roots and image composition (chapter 10)
- Side effects (chapter 11)
- Producing packages with pekit (chapter 12)
- The security model: privilege, audit, and operator authorisation (chapter 13)
- What goes wrong and what it looks like (chapter 14)
1.2.2 Covered elsewhere #
The package format and the repository protocol are specified in PSPU §5 and are not restated here. Anything a third party has to reproduce exactly — the container layout, the manifest schema, version comparison, the payload rules, the signature construction, the index schemas, the freshness rules — lives there. This manual describes what peipkg does with those artifacts, and cites the specification rather than paraphrasing it.
Security descriptors and the access-check model belong to the kernel's access-control subsystem and are documented with it. peipkg supplies descriptor bytes at file-creation time and never interprets them.
Roles, role features, core features, and applets are separate subsystems that reference packages. A package is a distribution primitive beneath them.
Service definitions, registry seeds, and reconciller manifests are integration metadata belonging to the artifacts that compose packages, not to packages.