RPM New Features

Oct 13, 2009

A few RPM developers from Red Hat and Novell met at the openSUSE Conference 2009 in September. The results of the meeting are now online.

The idea for an RPM community meeting of Novell and Red Hat developers came up at LinuxTag 2009, where openSUSE community manager Joe "Zonker" Brockmeier invited Red Hat developer Florian Festi to Nuremberg. Novell's Pavol Rusnak has now publicized a detailed report on the meeting. Included as RPM experts from Novell were SUSE developers Michael Schroeder, Klaus Kaempf and Stanislav Wisnovsky, and Red Hat developers Festi, Panu Matilainen, Seth Vidal and James Antill, among others.

One result from the meeting is introducing soft dependencies in the new official version of RPM. Soft dependencies are keywords that recommend further packets for installation. If and how Red Hat is to implement them in 

yum

is still being discussed, but they will definitely go into RPM.

Another result is file triggers, which should make package builds easier by removing scriptlets in spec files (such as 

%post/%postun -p /sbin/ldconfig

). Mandriva already uses this feature, so the RPM team wants to extend it to RPM. In the same breath, the team agreed to introduce two new scriptlets, 

%preup

and 

%postup

, to help in clean package updates.

Not part of the official RPM code is DeltaRPM, which creates a binary delta of two PRM packages. The source code for this feature will remain in Gitorious for the time being.

RPM developers also wanted a new payload format, because the current CPIO format has a file size limit of 8 GBytes. CPIO is good for most packages, but presents problems for distributing appliance images as RPMs, for example.

Aside from these feature changes, the RPM team has a few more on their "top 10" list. The complete report is in Pavol Rusnak's blog.

Related content

  • Moonlight 2.0: Microsoft and Novell Loosen Agreement

    In close collaboration with Microsoft, a Novell team behind developer Miguel de Icaza has released version 2.0 of its Silverlight clone Moonlight.

    more »
  • Mono Development for Visual Studio from Novell

    What a few years ago might have been considered a joke has now become reality: thanks to the Mono Tools for Visual Studio, developers can create RPM packages directly from the MS environment.

    more »
  • Novell Promotes Partner Ecosystem with New Growth Incentives

    Novell today announced a new initiative to increase revenue and profitability for solution providers and consulting partners who specialise in selling Novell® technologies. Among other benefits, Novell will offer enhanced partner education, joint marketing opportunities, and free technical support for those partners demonstrating expertise in selling and supporting Novell software.

    more »
  • Novell Releases Open Enterprise Server 2

    Novell has just announced that Open Enterprise Server 2 is now available to customers worldwide. Open Enterprise Server 2 features 64-bit software service support, storage management enhancements and NetWare virtualisation. Novell Open Enterprise Server combines workgroup services from Novell with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, completing Novell's Open Enterprise Server shift to providing workgroup services entirely on Linux.

    more »
  • Novell Releases Mono 2.6 and MonoDevelop 2.2

    The Mono framework compatible with Microsoft's C# .NET is available in version 2.6. Developers also upgraded its associated MonoDevelop environment to version 2.2.

    more »

Comments

  • great post

    Thanks a lot for sharing the article on cash. That's a awesome article. I enjoyed the article a lot while reading. Thanks for sharing such a wonderful article.I want to say very thank you for this great informations. now i understand about it. Thank you !
    http://www.cocoschanel.com
    http://www.gucciguccis.com
    http://www.urboots.com
    http://www.handbags2012.com
    http://www.louisvuittonslv.com
    http://www.uggmalls.com

  • RPM New Features

    A few RPM developers from Red Hat and Novell met at the openSUSE Conference 2009 in September. The results of the meeting are now online. Should you think that the title of this post is useful, odds are you are considering about using Linux as your primary or even just an alternative Os when you're just sick of your old system. However many think that Linux is too complicated that it appeals only to geeks, Linux-magazine.com can prove that this fantastic operating system is actually for everyone. It is often fascinating to read about RPM New Features.

    Roxanna Ciancio,
    http://autoinsb.com/ct/seymour.php
comments powered by Disqus
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters

Support Our Work

Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

Learn More

News

Tag Cloud

Administration Community Events Hardware Linux Linux Pro Magazine Mobile Programming Security Software Ubuntu Web Development Windows free software open source