The RPM project has announced the availability of RPM 4.10.0, which includes great number of changes since the 4.9.x branch. The RPM package management tool was originally developed by Red Hat and is used by many Linux distributions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Fedora, Mandriva, openSUSE, SUSE Linux Enterprise, PCLinuxOS and more.

One new feature in RPM 4.10 is its support for dpkg-style tilde notations in version tags. On systems where package management is provided by dpkg – like Debian and Ubuntu – the tilde character is used to append labels such as "beta" to packages without actually incrementing the version of the package. As such, the package foo-1.0~beta would not replace foo-1.0 as the former package is considered to be an older version, even if it was released later. This behaviour is not backwards compatible with older versions of RPM and as such should only be used in repositories managed by RPM 4.10.0-beta1 or later. Older versions of RPM cannot correctly update packages which include the tilde notation.

RPM now also supports 7zip-compressed sources for the creation of packages and its internal header validity and consistency checks have also been improved. According to the developers, the checks for OpenPGP package signing are now much stronger as well and the program can now detect file conflicts within packages.

A full list of the many changes in RPM 4.10.0 is available from the project's web site. The RPM source code as well as binaries can be downloaded under the GPL licence.

(fab)