With its superior package-management capabilities, especially for automated installations and upgrades, you may want to use RPM on non-Linux platforms. As the experience of many developers has shown, you can indeed use RPM on non-Linux platforms.

The rpm.org site maintains a listing of operating systems where developers have ported RPM. If you are lucky, you can download RPM for your operating system and start working right away. If you are not lucky, you will need to port RPM to your target system.

If RPM has been ported to your architecture, download the package and follow the installation instructions. If RPM has not been ported to your architecture, download the RPM sources and all prerequisite libraries. You may need to port each library to your architecture before you can even begin to port RPM.

The RPM sources use a configured build process that also requires some prerequisite tools. You need to get or port these to your architecture as well. Whew.

Once everything is in place, you can start the port of RPM. In many cases, you just need to figure out how to get RPM to compile and everything will fall into place. In other cases, you will need to work on each RPM subsystem to get it to build and run.

After you have RPM for your system, you need to initialize the RPM database with the rpm --initdb command. You can then start to populate your RPM database. Because a large number of libraries have already been installed on your system, you may need to create a virtual package that claims to provide these files. Installing such a virtual package will allow you to install other RPMs that may be dependent on system libraries.

Much of porting RPM to another platform depends on the RPM environment and how you need to customize that environment. The next chapter shows how to customize your RPM environment, on Linux or on other operating systems.