Software repository
Many software publishers and other organizations maintain servers on the Internet for this purpose, either free of charge or for a subscription fee.
A typical use of a package management system is to facilitate the integration of code from possibly different sources into a coherent stand-alone operating unit.
A package development process, by contrast, is used to manage the co-development of code and documentation of a collection of functions or routines with a common theme, producing thereby a package of software functions that typically will not be complete and usable by themselves.
Very few people have the ability to test their software under multiple operating systems with different versions of the core code and with other contributed packages they may use.
For the R programming language, the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) runs tests routinely.
At more or less regular intervals, CRAN tests Sally's contribution under a dozen combinations of operating systems and versions of the core R language software.
Beyond this, a repository such as CRAN running regular checks of contributed packages actually provides an extensive if ad hoc test suite for development versions of the core language.
and typically support a variety of formats in one package, so as to cater for all the needs in an enterprise, and thus aiming to provide a single point of truth.
Popular examples are JFrog Artifactory,[29][30] Sonatype Nexus Repository[31] and Cloudsmith,[32] a cloud-based product.
When doing continuous builds many artifacts are produced and often centrally stored, so automatically deleting the ones which are not released is important.
Tight integration with CI servers enables the storage of important metadata such as: Artifacts and packages inherently mean different things.
[34] Compared to source files, binary artifacts are often larger by orders of magnitude, they are rarely deleted or overwritten (except for rare cases such as snapshots or nightly builds), and they are usually accompanied by much metadata such as id, package name, version, license and more.
