Packages

In Distrø packages have various variables, like description, homepage, license and such, these variables are used by packo to help you find the packages you want to install.

Tags

Having tags instead of categories makes searching and definition a lot easier, just think about the fact that for example, you can mask all packges made by GNU, and use in this way bsd alternatives or something else.

You can apply various configuration to packages with certain tags, in this way configuration becomes super easy.

Features

Features are similiar to Gentoo USE flags, they specify (who would know) features for a package, for example if a package can be installed with a gtk interface you can set the gtk feature (in the environment or in your profile) and it will be installed with it.

Each package has a set of enableable features and packages can define what features can be enabled at the same time to not get broken packages.

Flavor

The flavor of a package is somewhat similar to features, but it’s a general change to the package, for example there are some default flavors that can be set, vanilla means the package has no additional patches and contains what it would contain with a standard installation, then you can set documentation to enable the documentation, or it will be stripped from the package, same goes for headers. Then there’s the debug flavor that adds debug symbols to the package.

Every package can set different flavors, for example rubinius-9999 has the flavor hydra which uses the hydra branch instead of master.