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Architecture of Flint

Repository

Repositories are stored on a local machine at /var/lib/flint, and ~/.local/flint/ unless otherwise specified in its library form

Manifest

The manifest contains repository metadata, including:

  • Name
  • Description
  • Public Key (The public key of the manifest)
  • Mirror URLs
  • Edition (Similar to rust/cargo edition, changes in language versions)
  • Hash type (defaults to blake3)
  • Package manifests

Each package manifest includes individual metadata and a chunklist (similar to mtree), specifying expected permissions, a hash, and expected size in kilobytes.

Chunks

Chunks are the basis of Flints content-addressable storage (CAS) and deduplication. Chunk filenames are derived from a hash of their contents and permissions. Each chunk contains the raw data from the file tree.

Summary

The on-disk structure is:

chunks/
installed/
manifest.yml.sig
manifest.yml

Bundles

Headers

A bundle "header" is a prefixed bundle extractor and runner, allowing quick execution without flint being installed.

Contents

The contents should be a repository with a single version of a single package, packed (NOT compressed) into a tar archive.

On disk format

Headers may be 64 KB, 128 KB, or larger in 64 KB increments. The end of the header is identified by the bytes 75 73 74 61 72 (ustar in ASCII, the standard tar file signature). This allows for flexible header sizes.