# Introduction

CMT is a configuration management environment, based on some management conventions and comprises several shell-based utilities. It is an attempt to formalize software production and especially configuration management around a package-oriented principle.

The notion of packages represents hereafter a set of software components (that may be applications, libraries, tools etc...) that are to be used for producing a system or a framework. In such an environment, several persons are assumed to participate in the development and the components themselves are either independent or related to each other.

The environment provides conventions (for naming packages, files, directories and for addressing them) and tools for automating as much as possible the implementation of these conventions. It permits to describe the configuration requirements and automatically deduce from the description the effective set of configuration parameters needed to operate the packages (typically for building them or using them).