After a year of development, the release of the package manager rpm 4.20.0 has been announced. The RPM4 project, developed by Red Hat, is used in distributions such as Rhel, Fedora, Suse, Opensuse, Alt Linux, OpenMandriva, Mage, PClinuxos, and Tizen. The project code is distributed under the licenses of GPLV2 and LGPLV2. Learn more about it here.
Next year, the publication of a significant RPM 6 branch is expected. This branch will involve a new archive format that will allow packages to be created with a size of more than 4 GB, overcoming the current restriction. The new branch also intends to allow the use of C++ to develop RPM. The anniversary of the project on November 27, 2025 will mark 30 years since the first commit with RPM. Versions of RPM 5.x will be skipped to avoid intersections with the rpm5 project, which is not directly related to RPM from Red Hat and has not been updated since 2010.
The most noticeable improvements in RPM 4.20 include:
- The introduction of the new RPM2ARCHIVE utility, replacing the RPM2CPIO utility. This change will simplify the transition to a new package format that does not use CPIO. The new utility converts the RPM file into an archive in the TAR format, compressed using GZIP. The old RPM2Cpio utility is now replaced by a symbolic link to RPM2ARCHIVE.
- Implementation of a declarative assembly system based on the use of the new directive “BuildSystem“, allowing the determination of the assembly system used in the package formation process. By specifying the assembly system, the source code is automatically prepared,