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• SOW 0.2: Documentation Preview

Release Notes

Every published SOW version gets a page here: what changed, what it means for existing repositories, and where to read more.

SOW 0.2: Documentation Preview

Published: 2026-08-04 · Version: sow 0.2.0-dev

SOW is a self-contained package repository manager from Pigsty. It is one static Go binary that creates and maintains APT (DEB) and YUM (RPM) repositories on Linux and macOS, and it does the whole job itself: createrepo_c, dpkg-scanpackages, reprepro, and modifyrepo_c are never invoked. There is no daemon, no database server, and nothing to install alongside it. The name is the verb — you sow packages into a repository, and the repository grows.

Two engines, one binary

sow create is the flat path. Point it at a directory that already holds .rpm or .deb files and it writes the indexes in place — repodata/ for RPM, Packages and Packages.gz for DEB, both in the same directory if the directory holds both. No workspace, no config file, no state. The same input bytes produce the same output bytes, and running it twice is a no-op.

The managed path is for repositories you keep. A workspace holds repositories; a repository holds dists; a dist is a named set of members in a single format. Payloads live once in a Debian-style pool/, and each architecture view is a hardlink projection of that pool rather than a second copy. Membership is a desired set that you edit with add and rm; build turns it into a published generation. Between them sits an explicit dirty state, so you always know whether what is on disk matches what you asked for. Writes go through a journal, so a machine that dies mid-add recovers on the next write command instead of leaving a half-written tree.

Verified against real clients

The compatibility matrix in the docs is measured, not asserted. Repositories produced by SOW have been consumed end to end by AlmaLinux 8, 9, and 10 with dnf (with both gpgcheck=1 and repo_gpgcheck=1), by CentOS 7 with yum 3.4.3 including correct multi-version NEVRA resolution, and by Debian 12 (apt 2.6.1) and Debian 13 (apt 3.0.3) with InRelease signature verification and by-hash fetching. dnf reposync on EL9 mirrors the pool layout cleanly. Flat repositories are consumable over both file:// and http://. Notably, SOW emits Acquire-By-Hash: yes — something reprepro does not support at all.

What the documentation covers

The site is organized into four sections. Getting Started installs the binary, publishes a repository in five minutes, and lays out the mental model. Tutorials walk end to end through YUM and APT repositories, GPG signing, serving over Nginx, and migrating off createrepo_c or reprepro. Features explains how it works — pools and architecture views, membership policy, the two signing trust chains, transactions and recovery, and the audit trail. Reference is the lookup layer: every command, the full sow.yml schema, package reference grammar, exit codes, repository layouts, JSON output, and the compatibility matrix.

Scope is deliberately narrow, and the non-goals are stated rather than deferred: SOW does not build packages, does not publish to remote object storage or a CDN, does not support multiple concurrent writers, and does not generate modulemd, sqlite repodata, zchunk, or source package indexes.

Start at the Quick Start, or grab a binary from the download page.