After installing RPM from source under Solaris v2.6, the following instructions exist to configure RPM after the "make install" step: 1. From INSTALL: You may add as many "provides: " lines as you like to /etc/rpmrc/ but ^^^^^^^^^^ they can not be continued. This is a directory, not a file. What is the file supposed to be? Neither a file nor directory exists on my Redhat Linux system with this name. 2. From INSTALL: You should satisfy dependencies for all system libraries. For each of the system library directories you should run echo * | find-provides.sh No such file called find-provides.sh exists within the source archive. 3. A file called find-provides.perl does exist - but the paths within this file look absolutely nothing like the default install directory of RPM (/usr/local). 4. No further documentation seems to exist for correctly configuring RPM from scratch. All RPM documentation seems to be for creating RPMs, not installing RPM.
1) The file is /etc/rpmrc, not to be confused with the directory /etc/rpm 2) The installed file is called find-provides, and is chosen per-platform from autodeps/*.prov. After install, you can find the file in (usually) /usr/lib/rpm/find-provides 3) find-provides.perl is a variant implementation, unused by rpm itself, but used, for example, for CPAN packages. 4) RPM is configured using macros, the complete list with descriptive text is in (usually) /usr/lib/rpm/macros.