About RPM

The RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a powerful command line driven package management system capable of installing, uninstalling, verifying, querying, and updating computer software packages. Each software package consists of an archive of files along with information about the package like its version, a description, and the like. There is also a library API, permitting advanced developers to manage such transactions from programming languages such as C or Python.

RPM is free software, released under the GPL-2.0-or-later. All of the source code in the lib and rpmio subdirectories are licensed under GPL-2.0-or-later OR LGPL-2.1-or-later.

RPM is a core component of many Linux distributions, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Fedora Project, SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE, CentOS, Tizen, Mageia, CBL-Mariner and many others.

It is also used on many other operating systems as well, and the RPM format is part of the Linux Standard Base

RPM is quite a mature project in the OSS landscape, with first VCS commit of the current tree dating back to 1995. As such it can be an interesting dig site for those with a weak spot for software archeology. Various major events from the over two decades of project history can be found in the timeline.