Chapter 5. Package Management

One of the advantages of Fedora is the huge amount of software available for it. Finding, installing, updating, and removing this software can be a daunting task, simply due to the amount of software available.

Fortunately, Fedora uses a software management system called RPM Package Manager or simply RPM (formerly RedHat Package Manager). RPM rolls all of the programs, scripts, documentation, configuration files, and data used by a piece of software into a single file called a package. The package also contains metadata describing the package, license, maintainers, and the packages upon which the package depends (for example, a KDE application will need other components of the KDE system to operate).

What RPM doesn't provide is dependency resolution: the ability to automatically resolve dependency issues. However, the yum system builds on RPM to provide this capability, automatically searching external repositories to find needed packages and install them automatically.

In this chapter, the sections Lab 5.1, "Querying the Package Management Database" and Lab 5.2, "Installing and Removing Software Using RPM" deal with individual package management from the command line. If you want to go directly to the simplest and most comprehensive way of managing software packages, skip to Lab 5.3, "Using Repositories."