Documentation

This page attempts to track the various relevant documentation that exists for RPM.

Books

The following books have been published regarding RPM:

• Maximum RPM A book written by Ed Bailey. It is available in hardback (442 pages), and has recently been re-printed by Sams in soft-cover (450 pages - ISBN: 0672311054). The hardcover edition includes a quick reference card. An on-line version of the original book is also available, and a more up to date, work in progress version can be found here.

• Red Hat RPM Guide A more recent book by Eric Foster-Johnson, this has recently been released under the Open Publication License and a draft close to the published version is available on-line as Fedora RPM Guide. This book covers everything from basic usage to advanced tricks, package creation and API programming. Participation in updating the Guide can be done via the Fedora Documentation Project. Discussions about moving this content and work upstream to rpm.org can occur on fedora-docs-list.

User Documentation

• RPM Tutorial
• Fedora RPM Guide
• In rpm.org wiki:
  • RPM Database Recovery
  • RPM Query Formats

Packager Documentation

• Creating RPMS slides from Guru Labs
• Fedora RPM Guide
• In rpm.org wiki:
  • Macros
  • Dependencies
  • Embedded Lua interpreter

RPM Language Bindings Documentation

• RPM-Python slideset / tutorial by Paul Nasrat.
• Programming RPM with Python from Fedora RPM Guide
• Programming RPM with Perl from Fedora RPM Guide

Developer Documentation

• Programming RPM with C from Fedora RPM Guide
• RPM API:
  • RPM 4.4.2.2 API
  • RPM 4.6.0 API
• Miscellaneous docs in rpm.org wiki:
  • Description of RPM internal state machines
  • Description of RPM file format