5.2 Terminology

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  • Package — a binary distribution artifact: one or more files, metadata describing its identity and relationships, and, when signed, a signature. The unit of build, distribution, and installation.

  • Manifest — the JSON document at .peipkg/manifest.json inside a package that declares its identity, relationships, side-effect requirements, and build provenance. The manifest is authoritative for a package's metadata (§5.18).

  • Files manifest — the JSON document at .peipkg/files.json carrying one content hash per regular payload file (§5.25).

  • Payload — the tar entries of a package that are not metadata: the files, directories, and symlinks it installs.

  • Repository — a collection of packages addressable as a unit, identified by its base URL.

  • Repository descriptor — the small JSON document at a well-known path within a repository declaring its identity, signing keys, and the locations of its indexes (§5.31).

  • Index — a signed JSON document listing packages available from a repository. Every repository publishes two: an active index (§5.33) listing the current version of each package, and an archive index (§5.35) listing every version ever shipped.

  • Virtual name — a capability name, rather than a package name, that a package may require or provide (§5.4).

  • Role — a virtual name that several installed packages may contend to own on the filesystem, with at most one holding it (§5.23).

  • Claim — the binding of a contended filesystem name (a claim path) to a file supplied by the package that holds a role (a target).

  • Holder — the single installed package that currently owns a role. A role with no holder is unheld.

  • Side-effect declaration — a manifest flag naming a standard maintenance operation to be invoked after install, drawn from a closed set (§5.24).

  • Installation root — a self-contained filesystem tree into which packages are installed. The default root is the system root; a system may define others (§5.19).

  • Epoch, upstream version, peios revision — the three components of a version string (§5.5).

  • Trust anchor — a key fingerprint supplied to a consumer out-of-band, against which a repository's descriptor signature is first verified (§5.37).

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