Linux in a Nutshell, Fifth Edition

The Red Hat Package Manager | 573

Package

Management

This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition

Copyright © 2006 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

RPM Package Concepts

This section provides an overview of some of the parts of an RPM package. Much

of the information is of primary use to developers, but because some of the terms

are referenced in the RPM command descriptions, they are explained briefly here.

An RPM package has three primary components. The header contains all the

information about the package, such as its name and version, a description, a list

of included files, the copyright terms, and where the source file can be found. The

signature contains information used to verify the integrity and authenticity of the

package. The archive contains the actual files that make up the package.

When a package is being built, one of the requirements for its developers is to

create a spec file. If you download the source rpm for a package, you can look at

the spec file; it has a filename of package.spec (e.g., yum.spec for the yum spec

file). The spec file contains all the information required to build a package,

including a description of the software, instructions telling the rpmbuild

command how to build the package, and a list of the files included and where

they get installed. Some other features of spec files include the following:

Macros

Macros are sequences of commands stored ...