Curious about rpm?
 

I'm wondering why rpm is shipped with slackware
Path: slackware/ap/rpm ?

what was the plan for this; was this primarily intended for just functionality of rpm2[t*z,cpio]?
If so, that is what I initially thought, although looking at slackware 3.3 it was not included as a rpm*.t*z pkg, but 3.3 contains the rpm2tgz pkg?

I guess it's to allow installation of small (!) RPM packages that aren't available otherwise. RPM2TGZ needs RPM to work, I guess. Here, I'm using it for some Brother printer drivers that are only available in RPM format.

Most probably for the same reason it includes the init.d and rc.0 through rc.6 directories. Slackware per se doesn't use it but these "Red Hat-isms" could be useful to some, as stated in /etc/rc.d/init.d/README.functions

You could inspect the RPM packages with rpm:

# rpm -pqil <package_name-*.rpm>

However I can only speculate on why rpm is included in Slackware. Also, do consider that RPM is in the Linux Standard Base.

Although it is perhaps a fact not known by many, Slackware has a second Package Manager, RPM, and it is fully functional.

We have both RPM and RPMBUILD able to install and generate RPMs.

In theory, one could change the Slackware build in RPM packages.

And even if the 'no-dependencies' fundamentalists will be in denial, the use of RPM packages format, does not mean automatically inclusion of dependencies. RPM will work perfectly even if you do not give him the package dependencies.

But a big advantage of using RPM (and not including the package dependencies) on build, would be the easy build, because of the power of language macros of RPMBUILD.

And so we come to the story of the rise of SuSE Linux, which initially was the German Slackware using RPM packages (yep, without package dependencies).

RPM is part of the Linux Standard Base (LSB), this is a good reason to have it included with Slackware. You won't have to use it.