All recipes inherit the base class with the default set of tasks to run. After inheriting the base class, a recipe knows how to do things such as fetching and compiling.

As most recipes are meant to install some sort of executable, the base class knows how to build it. But sometimes all we want is to install data, scripts, or configuration files into the filesystem.

If the data or configuration is related to an application, the most logical thing to do is to package it together with the application's recipe itself, and if we think it is better to be installed separately, we could even split it into its own package.

But other times, the data or configuration is unrelated to an application; maybe it applies to the whole system or we just want to provide a separate recipe for it. Or we could even want to install some interpreted language scripts that don't need to be compiled.