THE HISTORY OF RPM: HOW A PRISTINE-SOURCES RULE BECAME THE BACKBONE OF ENTERPRISE LINUX

Summary from the TLDR IT newsletter

RPM's defining innovation was not package installation but the “pristine sources” build philosophy: unmodified upstream code, explicit patches, and reproducible spec-file instructions. RPM's local package database differs from dependency resolution. Yum eventually hit scalability and API limits, and DNF replaced Yum's solver with libsolv while preserving the RPM format and most familiar commands.