More concepts

Overview

This section complements concepts with advanced terminology.

While not necessary to understand the basic usage, those advanced concepts are fundamental to understand Mamba in details.

Packages repository

A packages repository, also called repo, is a generic way to describe a storage location for software packages.

In the Mamba’s context, it may points to a packages server, a channel or a subdir.

Channel

A channel is an independent and isolated repo structure that is used to classify and administrate more easily a packages server.

Note

A packages server may host one or multiple channels.

Subdir

A subdir is a channel subdirectory specific to a given operating system/platform pair.

Mamba is a general purpose, language agnostic package manager. The subdir structure is a convenient way to provide and access packages depending on the targeted os and platform.

Typically linux-64, osx-arm64 or win-64 but not limited to those ones.

A subdir provides the packages tarballs alongside a packages index including additional metadata.

Note

In most cases, both noarch and <os>-<platform> subdirs are used for an operation requiring data from the repo

Packages index

A repository package index is a file containing metadata about all the packages tarballs served by a repo.

Note

Those metadata include license, file size, checksums, etc.

In Mamba, it is more often called a repodata in reference to the index filename repodata.json.

A repodata is specific to a channel subdirectory.

Package tarball

A tarball is a single archive file, compressed or not, that expands to multiples files/directories. It is typically a zip file or so.

In the case of Mamba, 2 conda formats are used as package tarball:

• tar.bz2 is the historical formats: a tar file/ball that has been compressed using bzip2 algorithm

• conda more recent format that allows faster access to packages metadata

Linking

Each package contains its files index, used at a step called linking. The linking consists in creating a link between the package cache where the tarballs are expanded into multiple directories/files and the installation target prefix.

The 3 kinds of links are:

• hard-link

• soft-link

• copy

The default behavior is to use hard-links and fallback to copy.

The advanced user may want to change that behavior using configuration (see the relevant CLI or API reference for more details):

• allow soft-links to be used as a preferred fallback to copy (try to copy if soft-link fails)

• use soft-links instead of hard-links as default behavior (copy is still a fallback)

• always copy instead of hard-links as default behavior (no fallback then)

Warning

soft-links more easily lead to broken environment due to their property of becoming invalid when the target is deleted/moved

Hard-link

A hard-link is the relation between a name/path and the actual file located on the file system.

It is often used to describe additional hard-links pointed the same file, but the ownership of the file is shared across all those links (equivalent to a C++ shared pointer):

• a reference counter is incremented when creating a new hard-link, decremented when deleting one

• the file system location is freed only when that counter decreases to 0

source: Wikipedia

This is the most efficient way to link:

• the underlying file on the file system is not duplicated

  • it is super efficient and resource friendly

• hard-link stays valid when another hard-link to the same reference is deleted/moved

There are some limitations to use hard-links:

• not all file systems support hard-links

• hard-links don’t work across file systems/partitions

Soft-link

A soft-link, also called symlink (symbolic link), is much more similar to a shortcut or a redirection to another name.

It is as efficient as a hard-link but has different properties:

• works across a filesystem/partition boundaries

• becomes invalid then the pointed name is deleted or moved (no shared ownership)

Copy

This is a most well-known link, a simple copy of the file is done.

It is not efficient nor resource friendly but preserve the file from deletion/modification of the reference.