After a year of development, the RPM Package Manager 4.18.0 has been released. The RPM4 project is developed by Red Hat and is used in distributions such as RHEL (including derivative projects like CentOS, Scientific Linux, AsiaLinux, Red Flag Linux, Oracle Linux), Fedora, SUSE, openSUSE, ALT Linux, OpenMandriva, Mageia, PCLinuxOS, Tizen, and many others. The RPM5 project was previously developed by an independent team, which is not directly related to RPM4 and is currently abandoned (not updated since 2010). The project's code is distributed under the GPLv2 and LGPLv2 licenses.
The most notable improvements in RPM 4.18:
- A new interactive shell 'rpmspec --shell' has been proposed, supporting macro operations and integrated Lua (rpmlua).
- A new command-line utility, rpmuncompress, has been added to simplify the unpacking of multiple files.
- The code for handling large files has been reworked, with added protection against vulnerabilities that manipulate symbolic links during installation, recovery, and cleanup.
- A new OpenPGP backend for handling package signatures has been introduced, based on the Sequoia project (an OpenPGP implementation in Rust).
- A clearer macro "ond" has been proposed to define conditions during assembly.
- Support for 'meta' and 'pre' tags has been implemented in weak dependency definitions.
- A new section '%conf' has been added to spec files for building configuration files.
Source: opennet.ru
