The main goal of PackageFS is to supply a simpler and unified interface for package management among all existing distributions. It has been projected for both system administrators, and unprivileged users. There are also some proposed future works that will improve actual package managers features (see section 6.4).
Why has it been decided to face such a challenge using a virtual file system? Before answering this question, we need to explain what we mean by ``simpler'' interface.
As we have seen in section 3.1, the file system occupies a central position in any Unix-like operating system: it identifies and manages various beings, like special device files or sockets. Furthermore, there are file systems such as procfs, which provides access to some specific data. The file system interface is the simplest one we know. The only way to reduce package management complexity to the same level of ordinary file system operations, lies in developing a new virtual file system.
PackageFS is not a new package manager, but it is a layer between the user and existing package managers. It must be run in the user space, because it has to invoke other programs and uses some library functions to accomplish many of its tasks.