Package

A package typically is a bundle of files that together allow you to perform a task.

Most importantly, rpm and deb packages allow you to install software, including its libraries, documentation and config files.

rpm packages

Let's have a look at a small rpm package file, distcc-server-3.1-1.i386.rpm. It is available from the internet and installs a distributed C compiler environment. The name consists of several parts:

• distcc-server: the name of the package
• 3.1-1: 3.1 is the version, -1 means this is the first version of the packager.
• i386: This package is for the i386 processor family. "noarch" would mean it is not architecture dependant.

Let's look what files are in this package:

# rpm -qpl distcc-server-3.1-1.i386.rpm
/etc/default
/etc/default/distcc
/etc/distcc
/etc/distcc/clients.allow
/etc/distcc/commands.allow.sh
/etc/init.d/distcc
/etc/logrotate.d
/etc/logrotate.d/distcc
/etc/xinetd.d
/etc/xinetd.d/distcc
/usr/bin/distccd
/usr/share/man/man1/distccd.1.gz