pm provides greatly enhanced database support for tracking and verifying installed packages Features įor a system administrator performing software installation and maintenance, the use of package management rather than manual building has advantages such as simplicity, consistency and the ability for these processes to be automated and non-interactive. pm preserves the ' Pristine Sources + patches' paradigm of pms, while adding features and eliminating arbitrary limitations present in the implementation. Pm was written by Rik Faith and Doug Hoffman in May 1995 for Red Hat Software, its design and implementations influenced greatly by pms, a package management system by Faith and Kevin Martin in the fall of 1993 for the Bogus Linux Distribution. RPM was originally written in 1997 by Erik Troan and Marc Ewing, based on pms, rpp, and pm experiences. SRPMs customarily carry the file extension “.src.rpm” (.spm on file systems limited to 3 extension characters, e.g. These have an appropriate tag in the file header that distinguishes them from normal (B)RPMs, causing them to be extracted to /usr/src on installation. There are also “source RPMs” (or SRPMs) containing the source code used to build a binary package. Most RPM files are “binary RPMs” (or BRPMs) containing the compiled version of some software. Īn RPM package can contain an arbitrary set of files. It has also been ported to some other operating systems, such as Novell NetWare (as of version 6.5 SP3), IBM's AIX (as of version 4), IBM i, and ArcaOS.

RPM was intended primarily for Linux distributions the file format is the baseline package format of the Linux Standard Base.Īlthough it was created for use in Red Hat Linux, RPM is now used in many Linux distributions such as PCLinuxOS, Fedora, AlmaLinux, CentOS, openSUSE, OpenMandriva and Oracle Linux. rpm file format and the package manager program itself. RPM Package Manager ( RPM) (originally Red Hat Package Manager, now a recursive acronym) is a free and open-source package management system.

Centos package manager