[Rpm-maint] RPM 4.7.0 released!

Panu Matilainen pmatilai at redhat.com
Thu Apr 16 09:07:21 UTC 2009


We're pleased to announce the availability of RPM release 4.7.0. Download 
instructions and more detailed information are available from:

 	http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.7.0

Here's the executive summary of user-visible changes since RPM 4.6.0:

General bugfixes and enhancements:

* Vastly reduced memory footprint in transactions.
* Vastly improved performance in file conflict checking, especially in
   package upgrades and erasures.
* Support for POSIX.1e draft 15 file capabilities in packages has been added.
* Support for the new XZ compression format (aka LZMA) in package
   payloads and sources has been added. Older "lzma-alone" format is
   supported in parallel.
* Verification now notices extranuous ACL's on files.
* Much improved handling of failed upgrades. (RhBug:454903)
* Rpm's configuration directory (traditionally /usr/lib/rpm/) can now
   be changed at run-time with RPM_CONFIGDIR environment variable. This
   path is also exported as %_rpmconfigdir macro which can be used to locate rpm
   helper scripts without hardcoding paths in configuration/specs.
* New "deptype" format extension has been added.
* %posttrans scriptlets no longer require re-opening the package at
   end of transaction. (RhBug:457126)
* Fix PGP fingerprint calculation. (RhBug:493777)
* Fix RSA signature checking when signature is smaller than modulus
   (RhBug:494049)
* Several memory leaks in signature checking failure cases have been fixed.
* Fix handling of some relative paths in rpmCleanPath() (RhBug:491388)
* Query and verify selection options are show just once in --help output.
* Permit package signing and signature checking to be interrupted in
   reasonable time.
* Avoid parsing %patch on spec query (RhBug:487855)
* Adjust cli-switches, spec parser and documentation for md5 ->
   generic digest change, aliases for md5 left to avoid breaking
   compatibility needlessly (RhBug:487597, RhBug:493162).
* Several updated translations.
* Documentation clarifications and corrections (RhBug:483253, RhBug:466597)

Package building:

* Disallow path name components (~, / and ..) in name, version and
   release tags (RhBug:493157)
* Changelog timestamps are always in UTC to avoid "time warp" syndrome
* rpmbuild can be configured to run a post-build package checker such
   as rpmlint. (ticket #2)
* %patch default arguments can now be controlled with
   %_default_patch_flags macro. (RhBug:471006)
* Package build dependencies are no longer needlessly checked on
   --rmsource. (RhBug:452477)
* Don't require sources and patches to be present for --rmspec to
   work. (RhBug:472427)
* Sub-packages inherit Group from main package if not specified.
   (RhBug:470714)
* New %getenv macro for retrieving environment variables has been added.
* New %getconfdir macro for retrieving rpm configuration directory
   (typically /usr/lib/rpm/) has been added.
* ELF files (DSO's and executables) in noarch package terminate build
   unless overridden by %_binaries_in_noarch_packages_terminate_build macro.
   (only if internal dependency generator is used)
* Improved Qt translation support in find-lang.
* Improved OSGi dependency extractor script. (RhBug:466111)
* Avoid unnecessary byte-compilation of python scripts in [s]bin directories.
* Update rpmrc defaults to use -mtune instead of deprecated -mcpu
   (RhBug:493696)
* Restrictions on dependency names have been loosened to permit eg.
   UTF-8 characters as the first character. (RhBug:455119)
* Dependency extractor scripts are only run once per file (with
   internal dependency generator), this can speed building of script-heavy
   packages noticeably.
* Prefer more specific types over generic "text" in file
   classification (RhBug:491349)
* Beginnings of librpm level Lua-extensions have been added. As of
   4.7.0, only rpm.vercmp() for package version comparison is exported to
   Lua.

More detailed compatibility information about the new features is 
available in http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.7.0#Compatibilitynotes

Changes since rpm-4.7.0-rc1:
- updated Polish translation
- check for termination signals during signing/signature checking loop
- pad RSA signatures to modulus size if necessary (RhBug:494049)

On behalf of the rpm-team,

 	- Panu -


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