This feature is one of the most useful for the system administrator. If it did not exist, they would have to spend several hours to install a software while trying to figure out its function from packages names. The information that a package manager retrieves may vary depending on package formats: name, version, release, current status, section, priority, dependencies, reverse dependencies, virtual packages provided, size, description and maintainer represent most types of metadata that could be retrieved.
PackageFS represents a package status in the directory hierarchy itself. In section 6.4, we show a proposal for the tree extension to support other status than the available and the installed ones.