rpmdb compatibility

[Florian Festi]

On 09/10/2013 09:43 PM, bishwajit goswami wrote:
> Is it possible to achieve rpmdb compatibility across different versions
> of rpm?
> We use rpm for our packaging and plan to package with the new version of
> rpm. This brings in a question of rpmdb compatibility with system
> updates since rpmdb has had several changes.
> Can I change the format of rpmdb between different rpm versions?

The format of the rpmdb does not only depend on the rpm version but also
on the bdb version rpm is built against. In general you should not need
to care about the rpmdb compatibility when packaging software as rpm
packages.

Typically packages build with newer versions of RPM should also work
with older rpm-4.x versions. There are a couple of new features that
need to be turned off like SHA1 checksums and xz compression or must not
be used like ~ in version or release.

The release notes of the 4.x.0 versions should give you a good hint on
what to avoid in their compatibility sections. See
http://rpm.org/wiki/News .

Florian