[Rpm-announce] RPM 4.17.0 alpha released!

[Panu Matilainen]

The beginning of this year has gone nothing like planned, and 
consequently we had to postpone and even revert some things originally 
planned for 4.17. But what the hey, there's plenty of good stuff here as 
it is, and there will always be another release.

Highlights include:
- More robust install failure handling
- Many macro improvements, in particular wrt Lua integration
- Some long-needed transaction API enhancements
- Beginnings of a reference manual

In particular macros have seen a big overhaul: built-in and user-defined 
macros have been unified internally, and in general can be called by 
using either syntax. The Lua-macro interface is much improved, macro 
arguments are passed as native Lua arguments, parametric macros can be 
called as native Lua functions and all rpm macros can be natively 
accessed via a handy 'macros' table. In theory this is all backwards 
compatible, but with as with any changes there could be something we missed.

For further details and download info, head over to

	https://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.17.0

On behalf of the rpm team,

	- Panu -