RPM Roadmap

While work on the stable 4.4.x branch continues in the form of bugfixes and minor enhancements, the development of the next major RPM version is going on in the main repository. Here you can find the roadmap of what's being planned for the next major RPM version. Please remember that this roadmap is speculative: while some items have already been done or well underway, we cannot guarantee that everything listed here will make it to the next version (planned to be released in first half of 2008).

API

Cleanup

• Move all exported symbols to rpm* namespace

• Hide internal details (private headers, structures etc) from the API

• Remove ancient, deprecated APIs

• Provide legacy compatibility headers as necessary (for renamed symbols etc)

• Audit parameter and return types (int_32 vs size_t etc)

• Separate CLI functionality from the core libraries (target: CLI tools must be buildable without access to rpm private headers)

• Improve API documentation, provide examples etc

Enhancements

• Provide nicer access to header information (ie. replace headerGetEntry() )

• Provide full verification API

• Add support for 64-bit types

• Redesign the (progress) callback mechanism

Internal improvements

Build process cleanup

• Clean up, modernize and correct RPM's auto*tool usage

• Make compilation free of warnings

Source code cleanup / refactoring

• Remove ancient vendor-specific hacks

• Remove unused and/or useless functionality

• Remove internal copies of external libraries where possible

• Replace internal network transports with external helper use

• Refactor huge functions to smaller pieces for readability

• Eliminate unnecessary code duplication where possible

• Eliminate the use of static buffers where possible

Test framework

• Automated build-time regression testing

Python bindings

• Full build API

• Full verification API

• Redesign the (progress) callback

• Improve error reporting (via rpmlog)

User wishes

• Enhance automated dependency extraction (libtool, pkg-config, python, perl...)

• Filtering of automatic dependencies

• Arch-dependencies (to avoid false matching of build and runtime dependencies on multilib systems)

• Soft dependencies (ie Suggests, Enhances...)

• ... TODO: fully summarize and classify the results of RPM roadmapping thread