Fedora 46 moves to the RPM v6 package format, 25 years after v4

On October 16, 2026, Red Hat engineer Panu Matilainen filed a proposal to move Fedora 46 from the RPM v4 package format to RPM v6, a 'largely invisible' modernization that will prepare the RHEL 11 base. For administrators and third-party repository maintainers, now is the time to confirm their tooling still reads the headers.