Understanding RPM internals
Linux distributions tend to have their own package manager, from Debian with .deb to Pacman in Arch Linux and other more exotic mechanisms. The intention of the package managers is to keep software installed on the system, update it, patch it, keep dependencies, and maintain an internal database of what is installed on the system. RPM is used by distributions such as Fedora, openSUSE, CentOS, Oracle Linux, and, of course, RHEL.
To handle RPMs, the rpm command is available in the system, however, since the introduction of yum/dnf, it is hardly ever used in system administration, and is not included in RHCSA.
RPMs contain the following:
- The files to be installed on the system, stored in CPIO format and compressed
- Information on permissions and the assigned owner and group for each file
- The dependencies required and provided by each package, along with, conflicts with other packages
- Install, uninstall, and upgrade scripts to be applied...
