Terms used across the xpm project

Terminology

The definitions used in the xpm project are listed below.

xpm is the xPack Project Manager. It uses several concepts and definitions:

xPacks (xpm packages): software packages managed by xpm; an extension of npm packages
author: from npm point of view, the package author is the person who maintains the package metadata; it may or may not be the same person who wrote the library source code or the binaries
contributors: from npm point of view, these are the persons who contributed code to the package, i.e. who wrote the the library source code or the binaries; for 3rd party packages, they are usually different from the package authors
dependencies: source packages required by the current project during compile/link time
development dependencies: tools required during development of the current project
actions: sequences of shell commands executed in the environment of the current project dependencies
properties: named strings with configuration definitions
build configurations: sets of dependencies, properties and actions used for different builds
build configurations inheritance: to avoid redundancy, it is possible for a build configuration to inherit definitions from another build configurations and then redefine some of them
LiquidJS substitutions: a mechanism for textual substitutions with variables, tags, filters used to define smart properties

More elaborate definitions are available in the Concepts page.