Who maintains RPM?

Who maintains RPM?

RedHat has been making some much needed improvements in the RHEL 4 version of rpm at least. A couple of years back Mr. Johnson apparently decided it was a good idea to remove all DB file locking from RPM rather then fix the limited locking that existed at the time. This was needless to say a rather bad idea and led to lots of accidental corruption. RedHat has fixed this issue. They've also been very responsive to other suggestions for fixes and changes. For instance until recently there was no equivalent for --ignoresize when trying to remove rpm's. Why did this matter? Because until recently rpm insisted on stat'ing every single mounted filesystem any time it did an add or remove. It is not out of the ordinary to have one or more remote filesystems in a less then happy state if you're environment is large and complex. Having your rpm remove hang for long periods of time was very frustrating.

In summary, RedHat has been doing a much better job recently on the RPM front. Now they need to formalize things and take back control. Based on past experience I wouldn't touch anything Mr. Johnson worked on with a fifty foot pole.