The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved RPM 4.20 to land for the Fedora 41 cycle that will debut in H2'2024. RPM 4.20 is a significant update for this widely-used packaging format.

RPM 4.20 works to advance hands-free packaging with a new declarative build system that has been in the works the past four years. The declarative build system can make it much easier on packagers with less redundant packaging snippets for common build systems. [1]This RFE outlines the work. A lot of boilerplate code will be able to be removed moving forward from RPM spec files thanks to this declarative build system support.

RPM 4.20 also provides file trigger scriptlet arguments, support for spec-local dependency generations, guaranteed per-build directories, a public plug-in API, increased install scriptlet isolation, and other improvements.

The RPM 4.20 Alpha release occurred back on 5 April. The RPM 4.20 stable release should be out well ahead of the Fedora 41 debut in October.

The FESCo-approved change proposal for RPM 4.20 in Fedora 41 can be found via [2]the Fedora Wiki with more information on these forthcoming RPM enhancements.



[1] https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/issues/1087

[2] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/RPM-4.20