Changes/RPM-4.20

RPM 4.20

Summary

Update RPM to the up coming 4.20 release.

Owner

• Name: Florian Festi
• Email: ffesti@redhat.com

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora Linux 41
• Last updated: 2024-10-02
• Announced
• Discussion thread
• FESCo issue: #3188
• Tracker bug: #2276421
• Release notes tracker: #107

Detailed Description

RPM 4.20 contains various improvements over previous versions.

• Hands-free packaging
  • Declarative build system
  • Dynamic spec generation extended
  • File trigger scriptlet arguments
  • Support for spec local dependency generators
  • Support for sysusers 'm' directive
  • Guaranteed per-build directory
• Public plugin API
• Increased install scriptlet isolation (#2632, #2665)

The 4.20 alpha release is expected in late March/early April and the final release is expected in time for the Fedora 41 release cycle as usual.

Benefit to Fedora

This release comes with many improvements. It opens the possibility for Fedora to adopt the new major features mentioned above.

Scope

• Proposal owners:
  • Release RPM 4.20 alpha
  • Rebase RPM in rawhide
  • Assist with dealing with incompatibilities by working with a provenpackager to get the affected packages fixed before pushing the alpha release into rawhide.
• Other developers:
  • Test new release, report issues and bugs

• Release engineering: #Releng issue number

• Policies and guidelines: N/A (not needed for this Change)

• Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

• Alignment with Community Initiatives: No Community Initiatives yet but several features (declarative build system support, dynamic spec generation and spec local dep generators) are relevant for Objective Review: We integrate programming language stack ecosystems

Upgrade/compatibility impact

%patchN

The %patchN macro syntax (where N is a patch number) is now obsolete and will produce a build error (instead of an warning in 4.19). Use %patch N (or %patch -P N) instead.

This affects currently > 1000 spec files. They need to get fixed before pushing the alpha into rawhide. This compatibility issue probably needs to go into the release notes

How To Test

Rpm receives a thorough and constant testing via every single package build, system installs and updates. New features can be tested specifically as per their documentation.

User Experience

There are no major differences in the normal user experience.

Contingency Plan

• Contingency mechanism: Revert back to RPM 4.19
• Contingency deadline: Beta freeze
• Blocks release? No

Documentation

Release notes at https://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.20.0 (still tbd) and reference manual at https://rpm-software-management.github.io/rpm/manual/