% xrpm -- Reinventing the RPM wheel
% Jessica L. Parsons <orc@pell.portland.or.us>
% Fri Apr 21 10:15:27 PDT 2017

#Xrpm

**Xrpm** is a reimplementation of the
[Redhat](http://www.redhat.com) Package Manager, because I
wanted to get some sources that were only stored in redhat format and
I didn't want to have all the overhead of the reference implementation
of RPM floating around my machines.   `Xrpm` simply picks apart
RPM archives and lets you examine and extract various parts of them,
while `makepkg` builds simple RPM packages that `xrpm`
(and maybe even the reference implementation, if I'm lucky) can
pick apart.

=[version 1.0.f](xrpm-1.0.f.tar.bz2)=
    Another decade, another release.   Fortunately the basic rpm
    format is fairly slow moving, because it didn't take many
    changes to keep being able to read modern rpms (a slight tweak
    to pick the compressor out of the rpm header instead of always
    assuming gunzip will work) and then there was nothing except
    for a fistful of small changes to keep the package maintainer
    sane.

    * xrpm now has the `--buildroot` option, which is maybe not
      the most intuitive name, but it's compatable with the (still
      unimplemented) buildroot option in `makepkg --build`.
      It simply tells xrpm to chdir into the given directory before
      doing the extraction when it does `xrpm -x`
    * the autoconfiguration scripts have been updated to the most
      current version, and I've tweaked `configure.sh` and the
      makefile to take advantage of that.
    * I added some almost purely cosmetic memory freeing functions
      (I ran [valgrind](https://valgrind.org) on xrpm and it spat
      out an amazing number of useless diagnostics, but it did remind
      me that if I ever wanted to embed the guts of xrpm in a library
      I'd need some memory deallocation so that the code wouldn't
      consume memory without end.)
    * A regression test suite, for automatic test paranoia purposes.
      
=[version 1.0.d](xrpm-1.0.d.tar.gz)=
    1.0.c didn't build **or work** on Alpha Unix, because I was
    making foolish assumptions about scalar sizes and what zcat
    was aliased to.  So, after a little over a year (this, I believe,
    counts as _unsupported_ in the modern computer world), here's
    a new and improved version of the code that works on a new
    platform.

=[version 1.0.c](xrpm-1.0.c.tar.gz)=
    1.0.a didn't build on [FreeBSD 4.4](http://www.freebsd.org)
    because it explicitly included a [linux](http://www.kernel.org)
    header file.  A few changes to [configure.sh](/~orc/Code/configure)
    were made and then I could have the system only include the
    Linux header files when the program is being built there.  And
    after that I needed to add the BSDs to the list of known
    operating systems (in a no doubt wildly incompatable way) so
    I could make packages there, and then **xrpm** was working on
    FreeBSD.   So here it is.  Enjoy.

=[version 1.0.a](xrpm-1.0.a.tar.gz)=
    1.0.a uses [configure.sh](/~orc/Code/configure) to set up for
    building it on your machine.   It works on [Mastodon
    Linux](/~mastodon), RedHat, and maybe on FreeBSD.

=[version 1.0](xrpm-1.0.tar.gz)=
    The first release.  Don't expect miracles or functional code here.