From The Linux Foundation

Our RPM specification in LSB 3 is ancient, and in need of serious uplift. At minimum, we want to move to the version 4 format from version 3, which is what ships in most distributions today.

This task has been given a project page. More structured info about the task, including project goals, milestones, and deadlines, is there.

Issues with LSB 3 RPM

Russ Herrold has documented a few of the issues in a mailing list posting, along with some commentary:

• Some believe that the advantages of RPM 4 are so great, there isn't much point without an uplift.
• Bug 1875 documents some problems with RPM as delivered in the 3.1 build environment.
• The RPM 4 format documentation is available.
• Tools to use RPM as a base for multi-platform packaging are available from Owl River. (Look for shim-*.sh files.)