[Rpm-maint] [Press release] RPM version 4.6.0 is out

Florian Festi ffesti at redhat.com
Mon Feb 9 14:14:59 UTC 2009


Friday 6th of January 2009 RPM version 4.6.0 was released. The primary
focus on this release has been cleaning up the code-base to make it
more maintainable and robust, and also more approachable to invite
more community involvement. Code duplications, memory handling and
various code pieces have been cleaned up. The local copies of system
libraries like db4, lua, popt and libmagic were removed. New APIs have
been established and dozens of old bugs have been fixed. A several
obsolete features have been removed from the code base. There also
have been a number of visible improvements. Some of the more notable
include:

  * Subpackages of architecture dependent packages can now be
    noarch. This allows to share language, documentation or data
    subpackages among different architectures.
  * Support for packages > 2GB (up to 64 bit sizes). Right now packaged
    files are still restricted to 4GB due to limitations of cpio.
  * Support for secure file checksums such as SHA256 and SHA512 as a
    replacement for MD5.
  * Improvements for package builders like better support for building
    packages as non root and better access to patches and sources in
    the spec files.

Full release notes can be found at http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.6.0

For a more comprehensive explanation of the most important changes see
http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.6.0#Compatibilitynotes

We want to thank Mandriva Linux and the Fedora Project for their
testing efforts of the 4.6.0 release candidates as parts of their
distributions.

The RPM development team


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