http://rpm5.org/pressrelease.php
WHAT IS NEW IN RPM 5.0.0
The Automake/Autoconf/Libtool-based build environment of RPM was
completely revamped from scratch and as one major result mostly all
third-party libraries now can be linked externally and in a very
flexible way. Support for the ancient and obsolete "rpmrc" files was
completely removed, as everything is now configured through RPM "macros"
under run-time only.
The RPM code base was ported to all major platforms, including the
BSD, Linux, Solaris and Mac OS X Unix flavors and Windows/Cygwin.
Additionally, the code base was heavily cleaned up and now can be
compiled with all major C compiler suites, including GNU GCC, Sun Studio
and Intel C/C++.
The RPM packages, in addition to the default Gzip and optional Bzip2
compression, now support also LZMA compression. Additionally, initial
support for the XML Archive (XAR) file format was added where the
implementation establishes a wrapper archive format for mapping the
four sections used in RPM format packages (Lead, Signature, Header and
Payload) to files with the same name in a XAR format package. Finally,
support for the old RPMv3 (LSB) package format was removed to cleanup
and simplify the code base. RPM 5, with respect to RPM format packages,
now supports RPMv4 format only.
Additional features for use in package specifications (.spec files)
were added, including new standard and even custom tags, new standard
sections, etc. Most notably, RPM is now able to automatically track
vendor distribution files with its new vcheck(1) based "%track" section
and now can automatically download the vendor distribution files, too.
