Tuesday, May 13, 2008

RPM 5.0 released

RPM is a powerful and mature command-line driven package management system capable of installing, uninstalling, verifying, querying, and updating Unix/Linux software packages. Each software package consists of an archive of files along with information about the package like its version, a description, and the like. [ For a short introduction to using RPM check out this guide ].

Exactly 12 months back, I had posted the good news of plans to revamp RPM.

New features in RPM 5.0
  • The Automake/Autoconf/Libtool-based build environment of RPM was completely revamped from scratch.
  • Configuration is now through RPM macros during run time instead of through rpmrc.
  • The RPM code base was ported to all major platforms, including the BSD, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X Unix flavors and Windows/Cygwin.
  • RPM packages now also support LZMA compression apart from Gzip and Bzip2.
  • RPM is now able to automatically track vendor distribution files with its new vcheck(1) based "%track" section and now can automatically download the vendor distribution files too. (Does this translate to automatic dependency resolution ?)
Read the official press release here.

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