Appendix A. New features of RPM in RHEL 7

This list documents most noticable changes in RPM packaging between Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7.

  • A new command, rpmkeys, used for keyring import and signature verification has been added.
  • A new command, rpmspec, used for spec queries and parsed output has been added.
  • A new command, rpmsign, used for package signing has been added.
  • The posix.exec() and os.exit() extensions embedded in %{lua:…​} scripts fail the script unless called from a child process created with the posix.fork() scriptlet.
  • The %pretrans scriptlet failure causes the package installation to be skipped.
  • Scriptlets can be macro-expanded and queryformat-expanded at runtime.
  • Pre-transaction and post-transaction scriptlet dependencies can now be correctly expressed with Requires(pretrans) and Requires(posttrans) scriptlets.
  • The OrderWithRequires tag for supplying additional ordering hints has been added. The tag follows Requires tag syntax, but does not generate actual dependencies. The ordering hints are treated as if they were Requires when calculating the transaction order, only if the involved packages are present in the same transaction.
  • The %license flag can be used in the %files section. This flag can be used similar to the %doc flag to mark files as licenses, which need to be installed despite the --nodocs option.
  • The %autosetup macro for automating patch application, with optional distributed version control system integration has been added.
  • The automatic dependency generator has been rewritten into extensible and customizable rule based system with built-in filtering.
  • The OpenPGP V3 public keys are no longer supported.