RPM 4.19.0 ALPHA released!

[dmnks]

What better time of year than April to release an Alpha!

This pre-release brings a couple of quality-of-life features and improvements for packagers, most notably:

• New spec snippet support for dynamic spec file generation
• New sysusers.d(5) integration for automated user and group handling
• Memory and address-space aware build resource allocation
• Proper shell-like globbing and escaping in %files

For contributors, perhaps the most important change is the migration to the CMake build system, replacing Automake. This is a major (and welcome) overhaul of our build system after many decades which allowed us to modernize and simplify stuff as well as remove some old cruft. It also puts RPM on a par with the other projects in our ecosystem, such as DNF, where the general trend has been in favor of CMake.

In this release, we've also removed a bunch of deprecated API interfaces, which necessitated a librpm soname bump.

Also worth noting is that the Weblate translations have been moved to a standalone repository in our GitHub organization, to simplify the maintenance of both repos, and turned into a git submodule. So, if you end up wondering where all the files in the po/ directory went next time you clone the RPM repo, here's the remedy:

$ git submodule update --init

Lastly, distro makers should be aware of the fact that packages shipping non-root owned files will, when built with RPM 4.19, carry a dependency on the respective user/group. For more information on this, as well as anything else in this release including the download itself, visit https://rpm.org/wiki/Releases/4.19.0.

On behalf of the RPM team,
Michal