> Was it ever possible, at any point in the history of RPM, for a RPM package
> to be created without a version or a release?
No. Absolutely not.
A package with empty or missing name, version, release, arch, os, license or
summary tags is simply invalid, and rpm could and should (but
### Context
Feel free to skip this context, and go straight to my question.
My team has written some software that uses librpm to retrieve the version and
release for every RPM package installed on a system (we use `RPMTAG_VERSION`
and `RPMTAG_RELEASE` respectively to retrieve this data). The
