Latest revision as of 07:46, 24 May 2012

[edit] Update RPM to 4.10

[edit] Summary

Update RPM to 4.10 in Fedora 18.

[edit] Owner

• Name: PanuMatilainen
• Email: pmatilai@redhat.com

[edit] Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 18
• Last updated: 2012-24-05
• Percentage of completion: 100%
• Rpm 4.10.0 final in rawhide, dependent packages rebuilt

[edit] Detailed Description

The RPM development team would like to update Fedora RPM to a pre-release version of 4.10 as early as possible to leverage the wider testing that Fedora rawhide gets. A stable upstream version of the new RPM is expected to be released well in time before Fedora 18 alpha. This is more of a "time-based code outlet" release than one with many new fancy features.

[edit] Benefit to Fedora

The full change summary (draft) can be found at http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.10.0, but some of the immediate benefits to Fedora are

• Performance improvements
• Automatic SELinux policy reload on policy changes
• Improved robustness: improved file conflict detection, more thorough input validation, added error checking and handling etc.
• Many bugfixes all over the place

4.10.0 also adds support for dpkg-style tilde-versions where eg 1.0~pre1 is considered older than 1.0, which makes handling upstream pre-release versions much easier. However this can not be utilized in Fedora before the entire package management stack, including the buildsystem, has been updated to support it.

[edit] Scope

Packages directly linking to librpm need to be rebuilt due to soname change, but no other rebuilds are necessary as no new package-level incompatibilities have been introduced.

From upstream POV there are no big hurdles expected in reaching 4.10 stable from current situation: some loose ends to tie up and basic shakedown after a fairly large amount of internal changes.

[edit] How To Test

Rpm has it's own test-suite which gets executed during the package build. Beyond that, rpm gets quite thoroughly tested in the course of "everyday activities" such as system installation, upgrades and package building.

[edit] User Experience

• The new RPM changes very little in the average "user experience":
  • Somewhat faster operation
  • Some annoying bugs have been fixed

[edit] Dependencies

• Dependencies are unchanged from rpm-4.9.x.

[edit] Contingency Plan

• Revert to rpm 4.9.x. As there are no database- or other package-level incompatibilities introduced in this version, reverting would be a simple matter of bumping epoch and rebuilding the packages linking to librpm.

[edit] Documentation

Release notes can be found in http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.10.0

[edit] Release Notes

No need for a release notes entry.

[edit] Comments and Discussion

• See Talk:Features/RPM4.10