As you perhaps have already recognized by the CVS commits and rpm-devel@
messages, the RPM 5 project team now entered the official release
engineering phase for RPM 5.0.

You can find details of the proposed release engineering roadmap under
http://rpm5.org/roadmap.php. The first step towards RPM 5.0.0 (scheduled
for release end of this year) is the release of RPM 5.0a1 today. Find it
under the files area http://rpm5.org/files/rpm/rpm-5.0/

But please keep in mind that RPM 5.0aX are *ALPHA* releases, which
means that the RPM API is still changing, the code might be still
partly broken, the primary audience are just early adopters in the
RPM community and the purpose of the release is just to get initial
feedback. It is *not* intended for end users or even be used in any
production environment. But if you are a software distribution vendor
who uses RPM 4, *NOW* is the time to start your evaluations of RPM 5 and
give feedback!
                                       Ralf S. Engelschall
                                       rse@engelschall.com
                                       www.engelschall.com