Packed provides some package manager agnostic utilities to work with Emacs Lisp packages. As far as Packed is concerned packages are collections of Emacs Lisp libraries that are stored in a dedicated directory such as a Git repository. And libraries are Emacs Lisp files that provide the correct feature (matching the filename).

Where a package manager might depend on metadata, Packed instead uses some heuristics to get the same information---that is slower and might also fail at times but makes it unnecessary to maintain package recipes.