As mentioned in the introduction, OSTree is also designed to allow a model where filesystem trees are computed on the client. It is completely agnostic as to how those trees are generated; they could be computed with traditional packages, packages with post-deployment scripts on top, or built by developers directly from revision control locally, etc.

At a practical level, most package managers today (dpkg and rpm) operate "live" on the currently booted filesystem. The way they could work with OSTree is instead to take the list of installed packages in the currently booted tree, and compute a new filesystem from that. A later chapter describes in more details how this could work: Part V, “Adapting existing mainstream distributions”.

For the purposes of this section, let's assume that we have a newly generated filesystem tree stored in the repo (which shares storage with the existing booted tree). We can then move on to checking it back out of the repo into a deployment.