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Network Operating Systems-I

notes
figure 7.1: rpm

rpm management goals

In order to understand how to use RPM, it can be helpful to understand RPM’s design goals:

1. Upgradability: Using RPM, you can upgrade individual components of your system
without completely reinstalling. When you get a new release of an operating system based
on RPM (such as Red Hat Linux), you don’t need to reinstall on your machine (as you
do with operating systems based on other packaging systems). RPM allows intelligent,
fully-automated, in-place upgrades of your system. Configuration files in packages are
preserved across upgrades, so you won’t lose your customizations. There are no special
upgrade files need to upgrade a package because the same RPM file is used to install and
upgrade the package on your system.
2. Powerful Querying: RPM is designed to provide powerful querying options. You can
do searches through your entire database for packages or just for certain files. You can
also easily find out what package a file belongs to and from where the package came. The
files an RPM package contains are in a compressed archive, with a custom binary header
containing useful information about the package and its contents, allowing you to query
individual packages quickly and easily.

3. System Verification: Another powerful feature is the ability to verify packages. If you are
worried that you deleted an important file for some package, simply verify the package.
You will be notified of any anomalies. At that point, you can reinstall the package if
necessary. Any configuration files that you modified are preserved during reinstallation.
4. Pristine Sources: A crucial design goal was to allow the use of “pristine” software sources,
as distributed by the original authors of the software. With RPM, you have the pristine
sources along with any patches that were used, plus complete build instructions. This is an

130 LoveLy professionaL university