RPM 5.0 Released

Two days ago, the RPM Package Manager version 5.0.0 was released, as announced on the official site.

The developers worked seven months to make the latest stable release of the popular Unix software packaging tool. The entire RPM project was relaunched in spring 2007, and the availability of RPM 5 will mark a major milestone for the somewhat Linux-centric RPM. It is now a fully cross-platform and reusable software packaging tool.

The code base was ported to all major platforms, including the BSD, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X Unix flavors and Windows/Cygwin. Besides this, the code base got cleaned up and it can be compiled with all major C compiler suites, like GNU GCC, Sun Studio and Intel C/C++.

The Automake/Autoconf/Libtool-based build environment of RPM was completely reconstructed from scratch and one of the major results is that third-party libraries can now be linked externally and in a very flexible way. There is no more support for the obsolete "rpmrc" files, as everything is now configured through RPM "macros" under runtime only.

To the default Gzip and optional Bzip2 compression, support for LZMA is now added. Initial support for the XML Archive – or XAR – file format is added where the implementation establishes a wrapper archive format for mapping the four sections used in the packages – Lead, Signature, Header and Payload – to files with identical names in a XAR format package. Support for RPMv3 (LSB) package type was removed with the intent to simplify the code base; RPMv4 is the only supported format.

New standard and custom tags, sections and more features were added for use in package specifications (.spec files). Thanks to the new vcheck based "%track" section, RPM is now able to automatically track vendor distribution files.

You can download RPM Package Manager right now from Softpedia!