Update RPM to 4.11
Summary
Update RPM to 4.11 in Fedora 19.
Owner
- Name: PanuMatilainen
- Email: pmatilai@redhat.com
Current status
- Targeted release: Fedora 19
- Last updated: 2012-15-11
- Percentage of completion: 33%
Detailed Description
The RPM development team would like to update Fedora RPM to a pre-release version of 4.11 as early as possible to leverage the wider testing that Fedora rawhide gets. The final stable upstream version of the new RPM is expected to be released during January 2013, which should be well in time before Fedora 19 feature freeze.
Benefit to Fedora
The details can be found in the draft release notes at http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.11.0, but the main "no action required" benefits are:
- Improved performance and memory use
- Improved file conflict detection
- Improved %config file handling
The other benefits are more packager-oriented and require spec-changes to utilize:
- Easy separation of licenses from other documentation with a new %doc-like %license directive in spec
- Fully automated patch application with optionally using DVCS of choice in specs with a new %autosetup macro
- Improved spec-parsing error messages
Scope
As sonames don't change and there are no package-level incompatibilities introduced, no rebuilds are required.
A *lot* of packages will see new warnings at build-time from the stricter %changelog date parsing, but this does not prevent packages from being built.
Upstream does not expect major issues or big changes from alpha to final, just the normal shakedown after a fair amount of internal changes.
How To Test
Rpm has it's own fairly extensive test-suite which gets executed during the package build. Beyond that, rpm gets quite thoroughly tested in the course of "everyday activities" such as system installation, upgrades and package building.
User Experience
End-users:
- There are no end-user visible changes, except for being faster and more correct.
Packagers:
- Packagers are likely to appreciate the new automatic patch application features
- Packagers will notice lots of new warnings from invalid dates in %changelog as the date is now more thoroughly validated, by far the most common case being wrong day name specified for a given date, eg. "Tue Nov 05 2012" when it should be "Mon Nov 05 2012". In addition some (rare) previously passing specs could fail to parse due to stricter validation.
Dependencies
- Dependencies are unchanged from rpm-4.10.x.
Contingency Plan
- Revert to rpm 4.10.x. As there are no API, database- or package-level incompatibilities introduced in this version, reverting would be a simple matter of bumping epoch and rebuilding, assuming use of the new spec features is delayed until "final acceptance" is gained.
Documentation
Draft release notes can be found in http://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.11.0
Release Notes
No need for a release notes entry.