RPM 4.12.0 Release Notes

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Summary of changes from RPM 4.11.2

General bugfixes and enhancements

  • New –nopretrans and –noposttrans disabler switches (previously tied to –nopre/–nopost)
  • New –noplugins switch to disable all plugins
  • New –reinstall mode which can handle changing file policies (RhBug:966715)
  • New –exportdb and –importdb switches in rpmdb(8)
  • New –recommends, –suggests, –supplements and –enhances query aliases for querying weak dependencies
  • New optional payload format to support large (> 4GB) files within packages (ticket #41)

  • New rpm2archive utility for converting rpm payload to tar archives

  • Fix curl globbing being enabled on remote retrieval (RhBug:1076277)
  • Fix $1 argument to %pretrans, %posttrans and %verifyscript to behave like all other scripts
  • Fix mixed binary + source rpm installation progress (RhBug:984724)
  • Fix file actions sometimes carrying state across multiple rpmtsRun() calls (RhBug:1076552)
  • Fix duplicate usernames causing false positives on verification (ticket #872)
  • Fix ordering to prefer self-provides on ordering when appropriate (RhBug:1111349)

  • Fix a double-free on unpadded signature header

  • Add support for “new” architectures:
    • m68k (again)
    • Sparc Niagara (detection)
    • ARM v6 and v7 (hardware FPU detection)
  • Documentation, translation updates

Package building

  • New warnings on invalid / dubious spec constructs:
    • Detect multiple %files sections per package
    • Detect empty %files -f manifest files
    • Detect multiple %changelog sections per spec
    • Detect duplicate Group, Summary, Description, Distribution, Vendor, License and Packager tags per package (ticket #27)
  • Add support for specifying weak dependencies (Recommends, Suggests, Supplements and Enhances) tags in spec

  • Add support for automatic generation of weak dependencies (RhBug:1117912)

  • New %{load:} macro to load custom macro files (from eg spec)
  • New %_smp_ncpus_max macro to configure CPU limit for parallel builds (related to RhBug:669638)
  • New %make_build macro for hiding parallel-build magic from specs (ticket #115)
  • New %_rundir macro for referring to /run (formerly /var/run) directory
  • New %__gpg_reserved_space macro allows preallocating space for signatures which allows very fast package signing
  • Add support for detecting and warning on macro scoping violations (RhBug:552944) when %trace is active
  • Add support for %autosetup -S git_am variant (RhBug:???)
  • Fix parametrized macros eating newlines (RhBug:1045723)

  • Fix around macro scoping problems in %autosetup (RhBug:???)

  • Fix ELF soname dependencies getting generated for non-library DSO’s too (RhBug:???)
  • Fix garbage sonames sometimes getting added as dependencies (ticket #158)
  • Fix various issues in dependency generator
  • Fix libtool dependency generation with libtool >= 2.4.2 version
  • Fix external dependency generator to use the same generators as internal one by default

  • Fix crash on missing name-argument to %package (RhBug:1123722)

  • Fix non-canonical path usage for matching in debugedit (RhBug:1077148)
  • Fix PPC ABI change in default configuration (RhBug:1085127)

Removed features

  • Remove support for %_noPayloadPrefix (rpm < 3.0.5 compatibility)
  • Remove experimental support for “collections”, added in 4.9.0

API changes

  • New rpmtxnBegin() and rpmtxnEnd() to permit clients to control transaction locking
  • New rpmtsImportHeader() to permit importing “detached” headers into rpmdb

  • New rpmtsAddReinstallElement() function for reinstalling packages

  • New rpmdbIndexIteratorNextTd() provides a nicer iterator interface to rpmdb indexes

  • New file info set iterator functions: rpmfiFLinks(), rpmfiFindFN(), rpmfiStat()…
  • New file info set iterator functions for accessing original paths from relocated packages: rpmfiOFN(), rpmfiOBN(), rpmfiODN(), rpmfiFindOFN()
  • New archive API on top of file info iterators: (FIXME: describe…)
  • New “rpmfiles” object + related API for random access to file info sets

  • Many new file info set iteration modes (FIXME: describe…)

  • New rpmteFiles() to return transaction element file info set, to be used instead of rpmteFI()
  • New rpmdsTagF(), rpmdsTagEVR(), rpmdsD(), rpmdsPutToHeader(), rpmdsTi(), rpmdsTagTi() and rpmdsSinglePoolTix() methods to rpmds objects

Internal improvements and cleanups

  • Lots of cleanups all over the codebase
    • Former “file state manager” eliminated and rewritten
    • “Package state manager” largely eliminated
    • File IO subsystem sanity & improvements
    • Berkeley DB dependencies isolated to backend code
    • File info sets are finally properly opaque
    • Handle trigger indexes within rpmds objects
  • Partial thread-safety by added locks/mutexes (FIXME: describe…)
    • Configuration and macros
    • Logging
    • Keyrings and keys
    • …
  • Fix symlink timestamp on install on systems which support it
  • Fix problematic license on internal mergesort() implementation (removed)
  • Fix rpm dependency on libselinux (moved to a plugin)
  • Fix installation to always use header, not payload metadata

  • Fix global macro state side-effects from rpmInstallSourcePackage()

  • Fix oversized stack allocation on verify (RhBug:1106594)
  • Fix buffer overflows on malformed macro define/undefine (RhBug:1087000)
  • Optimize package generation and signing considerably
  • Optimize file requires processing
  • Optimize installed dependency processing

Plugins

  • A new plugin system, internal-only for now (FIXME: describe…)
  • Plugins included in this release:
    • systemd_inhibit plugin - preventing shutdown while transaction is in progress (RhBug:1109927)
    • selinux plugin - basic SELinux support, previously in librpm directly
    • syslog - example plugin for logging rpm activity to syslog

Python bindings

  • Database index iteration returns proper types for non-strings
  • New rpm.fi methods: FLinks(), FindFN(), OFN()…
  • New fi.FLinks() method added
  • New rpm.files object + related API for random access to file info sets
  • New rpm.archive object + related API for manipulating package payloads
  • New te.Files() method added
  • New addReinstall() method in transaction set objects (related to RhBug:966715, RhBug:1071854…)
  • New rpm.strpool object for utilizing shared string pool with eg rpm.fi and rpm.ds objects
  • New rpm.header_magic constant exported
  • Fix several Python 3 compatibility issues (RhBug:1064758
    • Fix build- and sign-module initialization (RhBug:1064758)
    • Fix sign-module missing module methods
    • Fix incompatible module name usage (foomodule.so vs foo.so)
    • Fix misc Python 2 vs 3 API difference issues
  • … FIXME:this list is very incomplete

Lua interface

  • New rpm.load() function for loading macro files

Build process

  • New test-cases for various issues
  • Fix dist tarballs to use PAX format to overcome UID/GID limitations
  • Fix in-tree python binding build with setup.py (related to RhBug:531543)
  • Fix librpmsign library to follow same versioning as other rpm libraries for consistency’s sake

Compatibility notes

  • Packages containing larger than 4GB files cannot be installed with older rpm versions. This incompatibility is tracked with rpmlib(LargeFiles) dependency in such packages.