RPM

From GTALUG

RPM

The Red Hat Package Management tool was actually created by Caldera (back before they were involved with SCO) to manage installation of software packages.

It assists in both building and installing software packages, with an awareness of dependencies (e.g. - KSpread, the KDE spreadsheet, depends on having various KDE and Qt libraries, and so will require that, to install kspread, the other required system components be installed as well).

It supports the notion of versioning, so that your system can be aware of what components must be upgraded together.

It also supports doing relatively orderly deinstallation of software; you can ask to remove a package, and this will be done, if that doesn't break something else by removing some dependency that was required to remain.

www.rpm.org is the "web home" of this software.

Note that RPM is used by various Category:Linux Distributions which use various tools to more easily manage RPMs.

urpmi is used by Mandriva

yum is used by CentOS, Fedora, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux