2.2 pekit
pekit is the producer: the build tool that turns an upstream source
tree into one or more package files. It is described in full in
chapter 12.
For the purposes of this chapter, three facts matter.
pekit builds through the consumer's own decoder. Packing runs the manifest it just generated back through the consumer's validators, so a package that packs successfully has already satisfied the rules a consumer applies on the way in. A recipe error therefore often surfaces as a manifest error at pack time rather than as a recipe error at validation time.
pekit's own version model is not the package version model. pekit tracks upstream releases — git tags, directory listings — and orders them by its own rules, which exist to answer "is there something newer upstream". Package versions are compared by PSPU §5.6. The two are separate, and where a recipe's template variables expose version components they come from pekit's model.
pekit signs. A package is signed at pack time with a key named by the recipe's signing configuration, and the signature entry is the last thing written into the archive before compression.