A binary package built with xbps is a normal tar(1) archive, compressed with gzip, bzip2 or lzma and has the following structure: / /usr ------| /var ------| => Package structure that will be installed. /etc ------| ... /xbps-metadata /xbps-metadata/flist /xbps-metadata/props.plist /xbps-metadata/postpre-action.sh The xbps-metadata directory contains all the metadata related to this package. The flist file contains the list of files that the package will install. The props.plist file is a proplib(3) property list and has the following structure: architecture x86_64 installed_size 500000 configuration_files /etc/foo.conf ... run_depends bofh-2.0 foof-1.1 ... This plist might be extended in the future if it's required or useful. The postpre-action.sh script will be run as specified in the script, and will do post/pre installation steps required for this package.