After a year of development, RPM 4.18.0 was released. The RPM4 project is developed by Red Hat and is used in distributions such as RHEL (including derivative projects of 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 (has not been updated since 2010). The project code is distributed under the GPLv2 and LGPLv2 licenses.
The most notable improvements in RPM 4.18 are:
- A new interactive shell "rpmspec --shell" has been proposed that supports working with macros and built-in Lua (rpmlua).
- A new command-line utility, rpmuncompress, has been added to make decompressing multiple files easier.
- The code for handling large files has been redesigned to protect against vulnerabilities that manipulate symbolic links during installation, repair, and cleanup.
- A new OpenPGP backend for package signing has been added, based on the Sequoia project (an implementation of OpenPGP in Rust).
- A more understandable "%bcond" macro has been proposed for defining build conditions.
- When defining weak dependencies, "meta" and "pre" tags are supported.
- A new "%conf" section has been added to spec files for building configuration files.
Source: opennet.ru