Audience
Professionals seeking a solution for building computer software from source into easily distributable packages
About RPM Package Manager
The RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a powerful package management system capable of building computer software from the source into easily distributable packages; installing, updating, and uninstalling packaged software; querying detailed information about the packaged software, whether installed or not; and verifying the integrity of packaged software and resulting software installation. The package’s metadata is stored in the RPM header. The header is a binary data structure that stores single pieces of data in tags. Each tag has a pre-defined meaning and data type. These are not stored in the header itself but need to be known by the code reading the header. In the header, the tags are only referred to by their number. Each tag is either of a plain scalar type or is an array of one of these types. While not enforced by the type system the RPM code assumes that tags belonging together have the same number of entries.