Better ExtEnsion for RPM

(aka BEER)

"Better Extension for RPM" (BEER) is an alternative implementation of updating/buildroot creation and dependency resoving tool written in C. The main aim is to provide an alternative to YUM, which is very slow and resource wasteful as a native Python application.

The current BEER implementation uses YUM repository configuration files to download RPM packages from various repositories and resolve dependencies among the user specified packages to be installed. Since the BEER is a low-level tool, the location of RPMs as well as desired chroot could be specified directly on a command-line without any need of YUM to be installed.

BEER uses per-repository package caching, so reinstallation or updating of chroot is faster, because the RPM packages are held in local filesystem cache so that they don't need to be downloaded from web repository every time they are needed. BEER uses cURL for package downloading and RPM for transaction checks and the chroot installation itself. It can be used on any RPM-based Linux OS, mainly on Fedora Core/Red Hat ones.

To download beer please visit the Sourceforge beer page.