14 DAY TRIAL // RPM (originally Red Hat Package Manager, abbreviated RPM) is a command-line driven package management system, originally written in 1997 by Erik Troan and Marc Ewing for use in the Red Hat Linux distribution. Later, the development of RPM became a classical free software community effort, lead for many years by RPM' s primary developer Jeff Johnson. Yesterday, while celebrating 10 years of existence, the RPM project was officially relaunched by Jeff Johnson on a new infrastructure provided by the OpenPKG project and Ralf S. Engelschall.
The rpm5.org new official website for the RPM project now features both the latest RPM version 4.4.9, released from the RPM 4.4 maintenance branch, and some snapshots of the recently created RPM 4.5 branch. The RPM 4.5 release versions targets the classic compatibility issue, being also considered a drop-in replacement for all the RPM 4 setups. But the RPM team now mainly focuses on the development of the forthcoming RPM 5.0. The final RPM 5.0 versions were said to be released in the second half of 2007.
Highlights in the forthcoming RPM 5.0:
- additional support for the XML based archiving format XAR (http://code.google.com/p/xar/) - an integrated package dependency resolver - further improved portability - extended cross-platform support.
RPM has been - and still is - a core component of many Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise, OpenSuSE, CentOS, Mandriva Linux, and many others. Originally developed by Red Hat for Red Hat Linux, RPM is now used by many Linux distributions. It has become a major tool for software packaging on many other Unix operating systems like FreeBSD, Sun OpenSolaris, IBM AIX or Apple Mac OS X by the cross-platform Unix software distribution, OpenPKG. Moreover, the RPM archive format is also admitted as official part of the Linux Standard Base.