Changes/RPM-4.17

Change Proposal Name

RPM 4.17

Summary

Update RPM to the 4.17 release.

Owner

• Name: Panu Matilainen
• Email pmatilai@redhat.com

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora Linux 35
• Last updated: 2021-03-30
• FESCo issue: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
• Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
• Release notes tracker: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Detailed Description

RPM 4.17 contains numerous improvements over previous versions

• Much more robust install failure handling
• Many macro improvements, in particular much improved Lua integration
• Strict checking for unpackaged content in builds
• Long needed transaction APIs enhancements
• Improved documentation

• Tentative (planned but not committed as of this writing)
  • Split debugedit to its own project and package
  • Split language-specific packaging aids to separate projects (Python, Perl, Ocaml...)
  • Dynamic spec generation

Benefit to Fedora

See description for overall benefits, but in particular:

• All users benefit from the more robust installation
• Macro authors will have a much saner experience creating complex macros in Lua
• DNF for the enhanced transaction APIs

Scope

• Proposal owners:
  • Rebase RPM
  • Assist with dealing with incompatibilities

• Other developers:
  • Test new release, report issues and bugs
  • Adjust packaging to adhere to the strict buildroot content checking

• Release engineering: #Releng issue number

• Policies and guidelines: TODO: review the need to update guidelines wrt %exclude!

• Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

• Alignment with Objectives: no relation to current objectives

Upgrade/compatibility impact

• Many existing packages will fail to build due to the strict buildroot content checking
• Rpm no longer implicitly creates databases on read-only access, this may require changes to existing scripts/tooling

How To Test

Rpm receives a thorough and constant testing via every single package build, system installs and updates. New features can be tested specifically as per their documentation.

User Experience

The user-experience remains largely as-is, but install failures are handled more gracefully.

Dependencies

• dnf and/or mock will likely need some adjusting for the lack of implicit database creation

Contingency Plan

• Contingency mechanism: Revert back to RPM 4.16, but the risk of having to do should be negligible
• Contingency deadline: Beta freeze
• Blocks release? No

Documentation

Work-in-progress release notes at https://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.17.0 and reference manual at https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/blob/master/doc/manual/index.md