After a year of development, the release of the package manager rpm 4.19.0 has taken place. The RPM4 project, developed by Red Hat, is used in various distributions including RHEL, CentOS, Scientific Linux, Asialinux, Red Flag Linux, Oracle Linux, Fedora, Suse, Opensuse, Alt Linux, OpenMandriva, Magi, Mag EIA, PCLINUXOS, TIZEN, and many others. An independent team of developers also worked on a project called rpm5, which is not directly related to RPM4 and has not been updated since 2010. The project code can be found on GitHub and is distributed under the licenses of GPLV2 and LGPLV2.
The release of RPM 4.19 introduces several notable improvements:
- Added support for “.Specpart” for dynamic generation of Spec-files.
- Integration with the catalog of system users SYSUSERS.D for automatic user processing has been provided. This includes support for generating users and groups from files such as /etc/passwd, /etc/group, and systems.d. More information can be found here.
- RPM 4.19 implements support for road disclosure (Globbing) and the shielding of special symbols in the %Files block and the command line utility. The API adds RPMGLOBPATH(), RPMESCAPE(), and RPMUNESCAPE() functions.
- Support for blocks %Preuntrans and %Postuntrans with scripts has been added to SPEC files.
- An RPMSort utility for sorting versions of RPM packages has been added.
- The RPM2ARCHIVE utility now allows output to an unexplored channel.
- Options “–nopreuntrans”, “–nopostuntrans”, and “–nosysusers” have been added to disable scripts and automatic creation of users and groups during package installation.
- Assembly is now performed with consideration for memory and targeted space.
- The assembly
/Reports, release notes, official announcements.