Pristine Sources is a software management concept coined by the developers of the short-lived Bogus Linux distribution and popularized by

Marc Ewing Marc Ewing is an American computer engineer and entrepreneur. He is the creator and originator of the Red Hat brand of software, most notably the Red Hat range of Linux operating system distributions. He was involved in the 86open project in t ...

, co-founder of

Red Hat Inc Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. Red Hat has become ass ...

, after he adopted it and

RPM Package Manager RPM Package Manager (RPM) (originally Red Hat Package Manager, now a recursive acronym) is a free and open-source package management system. The name RPM refers to the file format and the package manager program itself. RPM was intended primaril ...

as a development philosophy for

Red Hat Linux Red Hat Linux was a widely used Commercial software, commercial Open-source software, open-source Linux distribution created by Red Hat until its discontinuation in 2004. Early releases of Red Hat Linux were called Red Hat Commercial Linux. R ...

. It was the concept that enabled Red Hat to build Linux distributions faster and more reliably than had been possible previously. Briefly, the problem with building an operating system out of the myriad pieces of open source (or free software) components available from teams across the Internet was that there were many of these components and they all upgraded on different schedules at different times. Ewing's insight was to recognize that he could not take responsibility for these components. He and Erik Troan, wanted to build a software package management system,

RPM Revolutions per minute (abbreviated rpm, RPM, rev/min, r/min, or with the notation min−1) is a unit of rotational speed or rotational frequency for rotating machines. Standards ISO 80000-3:2019 defines a unit of rotation as the dimensionl ...

, that allowed the team at Red Hat to avoid changing any of the source code of the software components they needed to use to build their Red Hat Linux operating system. It is best summed up by Ewing's explanation in a mid-1990s Red Hat manual:
"The Philosophy Behind RPM"
ref> Edward C. Bailey; Paul Nasrat; Matthias Saou; Ville Skyttä
"Maximum RPM: Taking the RPM Package Manager to the Limit"

References

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External links

*https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/3/html/System_Administration_Guide/ch-rpm.html *https://docs.fedoraproject.org/ro/Fedora_Draft_Documentation/0.1/html/RPM_Guide/ch01s02s08.html Programming principles