"rPath's Conary is a second-generation package manager. Considering that Erik Troan, rPath's CTO and co-founder, was one of the original authors of the RPM package format, some might be tempted to view Conary as an effort to do things right the second time around--nor is that view far from wrong. In its design, Conary is a streamlined version of dpkg or RPM with Yum in which all the utilities of those package managers are combined in a single command and combined with version control to meet the demands of a modern distribution.
"Conary relies upon a repository that is also a source control system, complete with branches and diff-like files called changesets that identify differences between the available versions of a package. Where the leading package systems identify packages only by version number, each name in a Conary repository is a unique identifier that includes such information as a package's location in the repository, the upstream version number, the source revision, the number of the binary build, and the specific hardware architecture for which it is intended..."
