RPM Development Priorities over the next 5 months or so

These items came out of ongoing discussions with rpm and yum developers. The sign denotes whether a feature is finished in the current git RPM version.

RPM

Internal design improvements

• implement dynamic macro expansion, current implementation passes fixed sized buffers to expand macros

• fix stack buffer overflows wherever they may be found

  • alloca() is no more used in the whole RPM code

• improve memory use/performance during transaction

  • File finger printing (FlorianFesti)

• Not important but hopefully low-hanging:

  • RPMTRANS_NOCHANGELOG or RPMTRANS_CHANGELOG_LIMIT

    • OR changelog as (additional) regular %doc file?

  • RPMTRANS_NOFSSYNC

Features

• LZMA support

  • only the new LZMA format (with magic at the beginning) is supported

• allow noarch subpackages

• %{isa} functionality for manual and automatic deps

• dependency/provide filters in build process

  • spec-global provide+require regex for filtering

• Add "hdr" manip. code for key/val pairs that yum wants

  • from_repo

  • note

  • installed_for (groupinstall+group/dep+dep/explicit - enough?)

• Correct file finger printing (FlorianFesti)

Compatibility

• drop internal lua

• drop internal Berkeley DB

• remove requirement of Group: - it must stay, however

• ignore BuildRoot in spec files, rpm should know best itself

• default fuzz factor for patches set to 0

• provide a mechanism to quickly see if the rpmdb has been modified (for caching rpmdb info w/o

  • having to constantly recheck the indexes)

RPM-Python-NG

• Ability to create/write an rpm signature and package hdr objects and serialize them

• Ability to access hdr manip. code for k-v pairs from above

• Transaction Callback code - from rpmtrans.py and rpmUtils in yum

  • code to check rpm package signatures w/o using rpm itself and using a keyring of keys

• a lot of the standard stuff that's in rpmUtils.miscutils

Related

• See Yum Development Priorities: http://wiki.linux.duke.edu/YumDevPriorities