[ Thanks to Kevin for
this link. ]
“RPM (Red Hat Package Manager) is the most common
software package manager used for Linux distributions. Because it
allows you to distribute software already compiled, a user can
install the software with a single command.RPM is the designated install tool of the Linux Standard Base
version 1.0.0. And eight of the top 10 Linux distributions are RPM
based (see the “Comparison of Linux Distributions” at
distrowatch.com listed in Resources later in this article). Even
some distributions that don’t use RPM normally, like Debian, have
tools available to convert RPMs to their own format. RPM is also
the best choice for packaging software to be used on Linux by
anyone other than developers.Whether you’ve developed the software yourself, or you want to
help an open source project by contributing the code to build an
RPM package from it, this article will help you get started. Future
articles in this series, by the way, will cover topics like
building RPMs without having to be the root user, patching the
software before building it, running scripts during install and
uninstall, and running scripts when other packages are installed or
uninstalled.”