Conary was designed to address many of the limitations of the traditional packaging metaphor. The enormous growth in the Linux developer base over the past decade has shown that packaging systems do not scale well to multiple repositories with conflicting content, and can make it difficult for large numbers of developers to coordinate package releases.

Conary provides flexible branching, which enables it to find both binaries and sources anywhere on the Internet, and allows the local administrator to preserve local changes and create local development branches of those packages. By providing a name space separator as part of the branch names, Conary allows many groups to use the same tool while building a single distributed version tree, without any formal collaboration between the groups.

Innovations such as shadows and versioning groups of packages and files (allowing those container objects themselves to be branched and shadowed) significantly reduce the difficulty of maintaining customized Linux distributions. Instead of being forced to accept complete responsibility for all aspects of the distribution, developers can now concentrate on maintaining just their changes. Those changes are represented in a concise way that can track upstream changes to the entire distribution.

Conary is designed to enable a loosely-coupled, Internet-based collaborative approach to building Linux distributions. By making branching and shadowing inexpensive operations that can change almost any aspect of a Linux system, we hope members of the Linux community will be able to build the Linux distribution they want, rather than use one that is merely close enough.