---
title: 'Hilde - The Repository Format'
date: '2021-06-27'
draft: true
---

Welcome to the second devlog of Hilde! In this post, I'll be explaining to both
myself and the reader what structure Hilde should conform to. This post will
describe the most advanced repository possible, and will hopefully allow me to
create a proper to-do list of features I have to implement. Note that this post
is mostly a re-write of
[this article](https://wiki.debian.org/DebianRepository/Format#Overview).

# Concepts

## Root

Each repo has a root from which it serves all files. I'll be referring to this
root as `$ROOT` from now on. This root is just the base URL for the repository.
Any package on the repo is part of a distribution, which is basically a way to
organize packages into categories. For example, the official Debian
repositories distinguish between `stable`, `stable/updates`, etc. Here, you can
also see that a distribution can contain forward slashes.

## Distributions

A distribution is located at `$ROOT/dists/$DIST`, where `$DIST` is the name of
the distribution. Each dist provides a `Release` file with an accompanying
`Release.gpg`. This GPG key is then used by the package manager to sign
the `Release` file. Additionally, the repo provides an `InRelease` file, which
is the same as the `Release` file, but already signed using the GPG key. Each
dist contains one or more components.

## Components

Each component is a further sub-category within a distribution. A component
contains one or more `binary-$ARCH` subdirectories, where `$ARCH` is the
architecture for the binary packages within. Source packages are located inside
a `source` subdirectory. For each `binary-$ARCH` & `source` directory, a
`Contents-$ARCH` (`Contents-source` resp.) file is provided. This file is
usually compressed using gzip, and consists of a list of all files contained
within all packages inside the component.

### `binary-$ARCH` & `source` directories

These directories contain a `Packages` & `Sources` files respectively, usually
provided in a compressed format. These files contain a control-file style list
of all the packages contained within the directory.

# Types of files

## Release files