The Salt Package Manager (SPM), was added in version 2015.8 to address a very common problem: the distribution of states and formulas to other systems. You may be tempted to think of SPM only as an extension of Salt Stack Formulas, but that is far from the truth. In fact, there is a much larger need for the distribution of Salt-specific files.
In fact, while Salt Stack Formulas was kept in mind during the development of SPM, the bigger concern were private customers and, in particular, government, military, and other secure organizations that have a need to distribute information in environments that by necessity cannot have a connection to the Internet.
Package managers are, in theory, a simple concept. A package is created that contains a set of files to be copied to an individual computer. Older package managers did little more than that, while modern package managers also keep track of file metadata so that installed packages...