RPM 4.20.0 released!

[dmnks]

Marking the end of the RPM 4.x era, one that spans over two decades (!) now, here comes one last major update in the 4.x series, before we make the leap to the 6.x series next year.

As per tradition, major updates are packed with cool new features, and this one is no exception. Among the most notable ones are:

• Declarative build system support
• Dynamic spec improvements
• Guaranteed, RPM-controlled per-build directory
• Support for spec-local file attributes and generators
• Support for group membership in sysusers.d(5) files
• Proper distro-agnostic debuginfo support
• Sanitized spec comments and indentation syntax
• Sanitized --build-in-place mode
• New unshare plugin for scriptlet isolation
• Plugin API made public

This release also fixes 20+ bugs, including a couple of (older) regressions.

We also did some more cleanup work in the codebase, including the removal of the legacy OpenPGP parser, the porting of the Python plugins to the stable Python ABI and the Perl dependency generators split-off into their own repo.

This time around, given the nature of some of the changes, the Compatibility Notes section in the release notes has grown quite a bit. You may want to check it out, in case some of it impacts your packages or use cases.

As mentioned earlier, there will be no RPM 4.21. We are bumping the format version to 6 (skipping 5 on purpose, see below) so expect no less than RPM 6.0 around this time next year. Notwithstanding the minor updates to 4.20 and possibly 4.19 too, of course.

Last but not least, if you're interested in a more detailed walk-through of the features in 4.20, Joe Brockmeier of LWN.net has recently published a nice post, make sure to check it out: https://lwn.net/Articles/988927/

(It also mentions the story behind the infamous version skip.)

Finally, to obtain the source tarball or the full release notes, head over to: https://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.20.0

On behalf of the RPM team,
Michal