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http://rpm5.org/pressrelease.php 
 
WHAT IS NEW IN RPM 5.0.0 
 
The Automake/Autoconf/Libtool-based build environment of RPM was 
completely revamped from scratch and as one major result mostly all 
third-party libraries now can be linked externally and in a very 
flexible way. Support for the ancient and obsolete "rpmrc" files was 
completely removed, as everything is now configured through RPM "macros" 
under run-time only. 
 
The RPM code base was ported to all major platforms, including the 
BSD, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X Unix flavors and Windows/Cygwin. 
Additionally, the code base was heavily cleaned up and now can be 
compiled with all major C compiler suites, including GNU GCC, Sun Studio 
and Intel C/C++. 
 
The RPM packages, in addition to the default Gzip and optional Bzip2 
compression, now support also LZMA compression. Additionally, initial 
support for the XML Archive (XAR) file format was added where the 
implementation establishes a wrapper archive format for mapping the 
four sections used in RPM format packages (Lead, Signature, Header and 
Payload) to files with the same name in a XAR format package. Finally, 
support for the old RPMv3 (LSB) package format was removed to cleanup 
and simplify the code base. RPM 5, with respect to RPM format packages, 
now supports RPMv4 format only. 
 
Additional features for use in package specifications (.spec files) 
were added, including new standard and even custom tags, new standard 
sections, etc. Most notably, RPM is now able to automatically track 
vendor distribution files with its new vcheck(1) based "%track" section 
and now can automatically download the vendor distribution files, too. |   
 
 
 
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