This release also restores NSS-based user/group lookups by default and improves the keystore locking mechanism.
RPM 6.1 has been released today as a major update to this package manager system for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora Linux-based distributions.
Coming almost a year after RPM 6.0, the RPM 6.1 release introduces a new release model inspired by the Linux kernel, new %define options for expansion at definition and global context, a new macro modifier syntax to support literal and one-shot macros, and new man pages.
RPM 6.1 also restores the NSS-based user/group lookups by default, after being somewhat eagerly disabled in RPM 4.19, improves the usability of the rpm-plugin-syslog(8) command with systemd journal, and improves the keystore locking mechanism to use a separate lock instead of the transaction lock.
This release also allows for users and groups to be provided by the system runtime environment, and closes file descriptors more efficiently on Linux kernel 5.11 and later and GNU C Library 2.34 and later to reduce installation time by about 26 percent.
The rpmuncompress(1) utility now honors the rpm-common(8) options and received support for CAR files, while the rpmuncompress(1) and rpm-setup-autosign(1) tools have been moved to the standard $PATH to make them easier to use as standalone tools, and symlinks are now installed in /usr/lib/rpm for backwards compatibility.
On top of that, the rpmbuild(1) utility was updated to understand the k build stage argument for running the %check scriptlet, the rpm-plugin-syslog(8) utility has been fixed to no longer show misleading operation names or emit duplicate messages, and there are various API and Lua improvements.
Last but not least, RPM 6.1 improves and fixes build and verification error handling, fixes the rpm --undefine and Lua rpm.undefine() commands to no longer bypass sanity checks, updates rpmsign(1) to sign files with PKCS11 tokens, and fixes Clang compilation errors and warnings.
Check out the release notes for more details about the changes implemented in this release, which is available for download as a source tarball from GitHub. RPM 6.1 will be included as the default package manager in upcoming releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and derivatives, such as openSUSE or Fedora Linux 45.