The building blocks of an eCos configuration are called packages. Packages are the units of software distribution. A set of core packages (such as kernel, C library and math library) is provided by Red Hat: additional third-party packages will be available in future.
A package may exist in one of a number of versions. The default version is the current version. Only one version of a given package may be present in the component repository at any given time.
Packages are organized in a tree hierarchy. Each package is either at the top-level or is the child of another package.
The eCos Package Administration Tool can be used to add or remove packages from the component repository. The eCos Configuration Tool can be used to include or exclude packages from the configuration being built.