RPM 就是 RPM Package Manager，它是許多流行的Linux 發行版的軟件包管理工具，譬如 Red Hat/Fedora、SUSE、Mandriva 等。經過七個月的開發，RPM 最終在近日發布了穩定版本 5.0.0。此版本使 RPM 成為了一個完全跨平臺及可重用的軟件包管理工具。

根據 RPM 5.0.0 的發布公告描述，該版本獲得了下列新特性：

RPM Press Release
The final availability of RPM 5.0 was announced in the following official press release:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  2008-01-05

    RPM Package Manager (RPM) version 5.0.0 released.

http://rpm5.org/ -- 2008-01-05 -- After seven months of comprehensive
development, the popular Unix software packaging tool RPM Package
Manager (RPM) was released as stable version 5.0.0. The relaunch of the
RPM project in spring 2007 and today's following availability of RPM 5
marks a major milestone for the previously rather Linux-centric RPM. RPM
now finally evolved into a fully cross-platform and reusable software
packaging tool.

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.

ABOUT RPM

RPM is a powerful and mature command-line driven package management
system capable of installing, uninstalling, verifying, querying, and