What RPM stands for [LWN.net]

What RPM stands for

Posted Sep 18, 2003 6:35 UTC (Thu) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054)
Parent article: Revisiting RPM Package Management

RPM did originally stand for "Red Hat Package Manager", as the December 1995 edition of the RPM HOWTO says in the first sentence. (Thanks to the Internet Archive!) Any claims to the contrary are revisionist history.

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What RPM stands for

Posted Sep 19, 2003 3:50 UTC (Fri) by lovelace (subscriber, #278) [Link]

Michael Tiemann addressed this recently when he spoke to the Triangle Linux Users Group (August 2003 meeting). RPM was consciously renamed to avoid trademark problems with other people using it. Personally, I think that was very nice for them to do. While I don't use Red Hat myself, I certainly respect them and what they've done and thank them very much for their many contributions to Linux.

What RPM stands for

Posted Sep 19, 2003 20:11 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

RPM does not, in any common usage, stand for anything. Like most acronyms, it is a word in its own right and means much more to the reader than any 3 word phrase that the letters might stand for. In other words, RPM is an acronym, not an abbreviation.

"Red Hat Package Manager" is the etymology of the word. You can't declare the etymology to be different after the fact.

Still, people like having underlying phrases for acronyms, just for fun.
They make them up even for words whose etymology is not acronymal at all. In that spirit, we have whimsical things such as "RPM Package Manager."