The notion of packages represents hereafter a set of software components (that may be applications, libraries, tools etc...) that are to be used for producing a system or a framework. In such an environment, several persons are assumed to participate in the development and the components themselves are either independent or related to each other.
The environment provides conventions (for naming packages,
files, directories and for addressing them) and
tools for automating as much as possible the
implementation of these conventions. It permits to
describe the configuration requirements and automatically
deduce from the description the effective set of configuration
parameters needed to operate the packages (typically for
building them or using them).