The ComPact Pool Manager is a tool that is primarily intended to control the contents and growth of the package pools, the caches of the ComPact build system. It may be used for fundamentally different purposes that are concerned with the pool structure, though, as it is highly configurable.
The pool manager acts on a selection of packages in one or more package pools. Which pools and packages are selected depends on command line arguments. Packages are selected by boolean expressions. If no expression is given, all packages are selected.
A selection expression consists of simple expressions like name matches io or outdated, which may be arbitrarily grouped using parentheses and combined via the boolean operators and and or. The meaning of outdated, fixed, and hidden is that a package with the same major and minor version but a higher patch level exists in the pool. Versions may be tested for equality and the usual ordering relations.
The following sections of this manual will aquaint you with the structure of package pools (Chapter 2), the structure and denotation of package versions (Chapter 3), and the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics ot the pool manager's commands (Chapter 4).