[CALUG] rpm packages and compression

[Jim Bauer]

Walt Smith wrote:
> just wondering...
> 
> As I recall from the prehistoric era,
> the rpm packages contained basically a 
> tar of files, and also install/uninstall scripts
> and few other things...
> 
> the tar was uncompressed.
> 
> The newer Fedora 12 uses rpm packages with a "newer"
> compression scheme.
> 
> When did using compression in an rpm package start ?

As far back as I can remember it has been a gzipped cpio file with some
meta data at the beginning.  Poking around, it looks like bzip2 might be
used for compression now.