FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE  2007-05-29

    RPM Package Manager (RPM) relaunched
    under rpm5.org with a roadmap towards RPM 5.0

/ -- 2007-05-29 -- at its 10th anniversary and together
with a new roadmap towards version 5.0, the project environment of the
popular Unix software packaging tool RPM Package Manager (RPM) was
relaunched under the domain rpm5.org by the newly formed RPM project
team, further on lead by RPM's primary developer Jeff Johnson.

The RPM code base was relocated from cvs.rpm.org to rpm5.org,
including the complete RPM development history since 1997 in the
form of the official CVS source code repository of RPM. The official
RPM code base now can be found, browsed, tracked and retrieved under
/.

On rpm5.org the RPM community can now find both the latest RPM
version 4.4.9, released from the RPM 4.4 maintenance branch, and the
first snapshots from the recently created RPM 4.5 branch. The RPM 4
series will be phased out with the release versions of RPM 4.5 which
still focuses on maximum compatibility and is considered a drop-in
replacement for all RPM 4 setups.
    
The main RPM development is already focused on the development
of the forthcoming RPM 5.0. The primary goals of RPM 5.0 are
the additional support for the XML based archiving format XAR
(http://code.google.com/p/xar/), an integrated package dependency
resolver, further improved portability and extended cross-platform
support. The final RPM 5.0 versions are expected to be released in
the second half of 2007.

ABOUT RPM

RPM is a powerful and mature command-line driven package management
system capable of installing, uninstalling, verifying, querying, and
updating Unix 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, Perl or Python.

Traditionally, RPM is a core component of many Linux distributions,
including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Novell SUSE Linux
Enterprise, openSUSE, CentOS, Mandriva Linux, and many others. But
RPM is also used for software packaging on many other Unix operating
systems like FreeBSD, Sun OpenSolaris, IBM AIX and Apple Mac OS X by
the cross-platform Unix software distribution OpenPKG. Additionally,
the RPM archive format is an official part of the Linux Standard
Base (LSB). RPM is released as free software under the GNU LGPL
distribution license.

HISTORY OF RPM

RPM was originally written in 1997 by Erik Troan and Marc Ewing for
use in the Red Hat Linux distribution. Later the development of RPM
became a classical free software community effort, now lead since many
years by RPM's primary developer Jeff Johnson. In 2007 the RPM project
was relaunched by Jeff Johnson on a new infrastructure provided by the
OpenPKG project and its Ralf S. Engelschall.