[ggg2]

it doesn't explain anything!

this is a indepth user guide, at most.

[isostatic]

Thanks, I won't bother

I know rpm is a cpio archive, with the files and some scripts, but the capabilities, when the scripts are run, etc I'm not sure of (I don't encounter rpms much - I'm a deb person, and I'm happy with my "ar -x" to explode my deb and look at the dependencies, conffiles, install/remove scripts, etc to install our custom packages on any rare centos servers we may need)

[vetinari]

It is a cpio archive with a custom header, so `rpm2cpio package.rpm | cpio ...` is needed to explode it.

To look at scripts/dependencies/etc you don't need to explode it at all, rpm has switches for querying that.