Former Red Hat Execs Want To Right-Size Linux


That bundling may not sound revolutionary, but consider this: Troan came up with Red Hat Package Manager, or RPM, the product that distinguished Red Hat from other Linux distributors. RPM is a method of describing a Linux package amid hundreds of other components. Except for the kernel, Linux consists of hundreds of small component packages. Knowing which package is the most recent and the dependencies between packages was once a skill possessed only by highly knowledgeable Linux programmers. Red Hat simplified all that by embedding the information within the package and allowing automated assembly of a Linux operating system.