The new version of RPM 4.17 has already been released and these are its news

The new version of RPM 4.17 was released recently and in this new version various fixes have been made that improve this package manager, since for example the handling of failures, the interface to create macros in Lua language, new plugins and more have been improved.

The RPM4 project is developed by Red Hat and is used in distributions like RHEL (including projects derived from CentOS, Scientific Linux, AsiaLinux, Red Flag Linux, Oracle Linux), Fedora, SUSE, openSUSE, ALT Linux, OpenMandriva, Mageia, PCLinuxOS, Tizen, and many others.

Previously, an independent development team developed the RPM5 project, which is not directly related to RPM4 and is currently abandoned (it has not been updated since 2010).

An RPM package can contain an arbitrary set of files. Most RPM files are "binary RPM" (or BRPM) that contain the compiled version of some software. There are also "source RPMs" (or SRPM) that contain the source code used to build a binary package.

SRPMs usually have the file extension ".src.rpm" (.spm in file systems limited to 3 characters long, for example old DOS FATs).

RPM features include:

  • Packets can be encrypted and verified with GPG and MD5.
  • Source code files (eg .tar.gz, .tar.bz2) are included in SRPMs, allowing for later verification.
  • PatchRPMs and DeltaRPMs, which are equivalent to patch files, can incrementally update installed RPM packages.
  • Dependencies can be resolved automatically by the package manager.

Main new features of RPM 4.17

In this new version of RPM 4.17 it is highlighted that fault handling during installation has been greatly improved, In addition, the interface to create macros in Lua language has also been improved.

Regarding the part of the improvements that are presented in the accessories, it is highlighted that dbus -nouncer plugins added to report RPM transactions via D-Bus, fapolicyd to define file access policies and plugin fs-verity to verify the authenticity of individual files using the fs-verity mechanism built into the kernel.

In buildroot, by default, a rule was applied to delete ".la" files and added rule to clear executable bit from shared library files.

In addition to it, it is also highlighted that work has been carried out to improve some internal aspects, such as that man pages have been converted to Markdown format, unattended scripts have been cleaned up, beecrypt and NSS crypto backends removed and that an initial draft of the package management and packaging guide is also provided

On the other hand it is mentioned that DBD backend has been removed to store data in Berkeley DB (For compatibility with older systems, the BDB_RO backend is left in read-only mode). Sqlite is used as the default database and that Python helper drivers and package generators are separated into a separate project.

Of the other changes that stand out from this new version:

  • Added built-in macro% {exist:…} to verify the existence of the file.
  • The capabilities of the API to process transactions have been extended.
  • The syntax for built-in and user-defined macros has been unified, as well as the format for calling them (% foo arg,% {foo arg}, and% {foo: arg} are now equivalent).
  • Added support for EdDSA digital signatures.
  • The utilities for extracting Debuginfo are separate in a separate project.
  • Fixed reading of regression rpm v3 and other packages
  • Many new and improved translations
  • Fixed parametric macro arguments defined by cli.
  • Fix for missing error code in –eval if writing to stdout fails
  • Fix file permissions requested by API not respected
  • Fix unnecessary invalidation of the database cache
  • Add support for the Darwin operating system

Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it of this new version, you can check the details In the following link.


Be the first to comment

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked with *

*

*

  1. Responsible for the data: Miguel Ángel Gatón
  2. Purpose of the data: Control SPAM, comment management.
  3. Legitimation: Your consent
  4. Communication of the data: The data will not be communicated to third parties except by legal obligation.
  5. Data storage: Database hosted by Occentus Networks (EU)
  6. Rights: At any time you can limit, recover and delete your information.