The RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a central technology in the OpenPKG cross-platform multiple-instance Unix software distribution.
Unfortunately, during the last one and a half year the future of RPM was shadowed by uncertainty in the RPM community after RPM's primary developer Jeff Johnson left RPM's origin Red Hat. Red Hat on rpm.org started to maintain their older version (based on RPM 4.4.2) in a new Mercurial repository and until today had not released any new versions while Jeff Johnson continued to develop forward the original RPM code base in the CVS repository on cvs.rpm.org and also released newer versions of RPM 4.4 from his private site jbj.org. As OpenPKG depends on RPM and Ralf S. Engelschall is both an Open Source software developer and a strong supporter of important foreign Open Source software projects, he agreed to actively support Jeff Johnson's new stated roadmap towards the forthcoming RPM 5.0 by providing him and his newly formed RPM project team the necessary central project infrastructure. rpm5.org was chosen by Jeff Johnson as the new location, under which today the RPM project was finally relaunched by him. As the future of RPM is now no longer uncertain, OpenPKG decided to switch to Jeff Johnson's forthcoming RPM 5.0 as soon as it is available. It is planned that OpenPKG Community CURRENT soon at least will be upgraded to the new intermediate RPM 4.5 version. For more information on rpm5.org please see the following copy of the official rpm5.org press release which also can be found under the URL http://rpm5.org/roadmap.php ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE 2007-05-29 RPM Package Manager (RPM) relaunched under rpm5.org with a roadmap towards RPM 5.0 http://rpm5.org/ -- 2007-05-29 -- at its 10th anniversary and together with a new roadmap towards version 5.0, the project environment of the popular Unix software packaging tool RPM Package Manager (RPM) was relaunched under the domain rpm5.org by the newly formed RPM project team, further on lead by RPM's primary developer Jeff Johnson. The RPM code base was relocated from cvs.rpm.org to rpm5.org, including the complete RPM development history since 1997 in the form of the official CVS source code repository of RPM. The official RPM code base now can be found, browsed, tracked and retrieved under http://rpm5.org/. On rpm5.org the RPM community can now find both the latest RPM version 4.4.9, released from the RPM 4.4 maintenance branch, and the first snapshots from the recently created RPM 4.5 branch. The RPM 4 series will be phased out with the release versions of RPM 4.5 which still focuses on maximum compatibility and is considered a drop-in replacement for all RPM 4 setups. The main RPM development is already focused on the development of the forthcoming RPM 5.0. The primary goals of RPM 5.0 are the additional support for the XML based archiving format XAR (http://code.google.com/p/xar/), an integrated package dependency resolver, further improved portability and extended cross-platform support. The final RPM 5.0 versions are expected to be released in the second half of 2007. ABOUT RPM RPM is a powerful and mature command-line driven package management system capable of installing, uninstalling, verifying, querying, and updating Unix software packages. Each software package consists of an archive of files along with information about the package like its version, a description, and the like. There is also a library API, permitting advanced developers to manage such transactions from programming languages such as C, Perl or Python. Traditionally, RPM is a core component of many Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE, CentOS, Mandriva Linux, and many others. But RPM is also used for software packaging on many other Unix operating systems like FreeBSD, Sun OpenSolaris, IBM AIX and Apple Mac OS X by the cross-platform Unix software distribution OpenPKG. Additionally, the RPM archive format is an official part of the Linux Standard Base (LSB). RPM is released as free software under the GNU LGPL distribution license. HISTORY OF RPM RPM was originally written in 1997 by Erik Troan and Marc Ewing for use in the Red Hat Linux distribution. Later the development of RPM became a classical free software community effort, now lead since many years by RPM's primary developer Jeff Johnson. In 2007 the RPM project was relaunched by Jeff Johnson on a new infrastructure provided by the OpenPKG project and its Ralf S. Engelschall. ______________________________________________________________________ OpenPKG http://openpkg.org Announcement List openpkg-announce@openpkg.org
