Conary provides a fresh approach to open source software management and provisioning, one that applies new ideas from distributed configuration management tools such as GNU arch and monotone. Rather than concentrating on separate package files as RPM and dpkg do, Conary uses networked repositories containing a structured version hierarchy of all the files and organized sets of files in a distribution.
This new approach gives us exciting new features:
Conary allows you to maintain and publish changes, both by allowing you to create new branches of development, and by helping track changes to existing branches of development while maintaining local changes.
Conary intelligently preserves local changes on installed systems. An update will not blindly obliterate changes that you have made on your local system.
Conary can duplicate local changes made on one machine, installing those changes systematically on other machines, thereby easing provisioning of large sets of similar or identical systems.