Rant

[Thomas Mondoshawan Tate]

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On Tue, Oct 09, 2001 at 04:50:50PM -0700, Armand wrote:
> "der.hans" <PLUGd@LuftHans.com> writes:
>=20
> > Can RPMs be opened with common *NIX tools as well?
> >=20
> > ciao,
> >=20
> > der.hans
> > --=20
>=20
> Yes, and individual files can be extracted with Midnight Commander.
>=20
> Cheers,
> Armand

Additionally, after reading through the RPM documentation, the RPM files are
really nothing more than CPIO archives compressed with either gzip or bzip2
and a huge header containing version information and file signatures in it.

Ironicially, the original version of RPM (then called pm) used a tar.gz file
format, but RedHat changed it to cpio, pulled out most of the integral
information for the packages and moved it into the header structure.

--=20
Thomas "Mondoshawan" Tate
phoenix@psy.ed.asu.edu
http://tank.dyndns.org

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