RPM 4.20 Released With Declarative Build System Support, Public Plugin API

RPM 4.20 is out today as the newest feature release to this package manager system that's been in development the past year and featuring a variety of improvements for the likes of RHEL and Fedora based distributions.

RPM 4.20 introduces declarative build system support, improvements to dynamic SPEC handling, guaranteed RPM-controlled per-build directories, distro-agnostic debuginfo support, a public plug-in API, and other enhancements.

- 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

The v4.20 release notes go on to explain the declarative build system support:

"The new BuildSystem directive is now available for declaring which build system is used by the packaged software. With this directive, the sources will be automatically prepared, compiled and installed according to the given build system’s best practices, instead of requiring the packagers to provide the %prep, %build or %install scriptlets themselves. This reduces boilerplate while still allowing packagers to tweak these steps if necessary, such as to conform to the distribution’s guidelines or preferences. Build systems can be registered with RPM by defining a collection of macros. Note that RPM itself will not ship these definitions by itself, this is left to the distributions or build system maintainers. We provide examples for Autotools and CMake, however, which can be used for inspiration."

More details on today's RPM 4.20 debut via RPM.org.

RPM 4.20 can be found in use with the upcoming Fedora 41 release.