Package managers

yum/rpm
To see a list of the files in some remote package use;
 * 1) repoquery -ql gstreamer

To see what objects it provides use...; ???

http://fedorasolved.org/Members/zcat/yum-rpm-faq

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2011/08/yum-command-examples/

extract a single file http://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/YumAndRPM

http://cimarron-taylor.appspot.com/html/0901/090107-yum.html

yum with chef. http://wiki.opscode.com/display/chef/Yum+Package+Resource

RPM
inspect a file from a package; rpm2cpio logrotate-1.0-1.i386.rpm |cpio -ivd etc/logrotate.conf

verify what files have been altered since installation; rpm -V packagename

some notes on the options, and how they are structued http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm/

Specfiles
Details of the specfile; http://www.rpm.org/max-rpm/ch-rpm-inside.html

Comments — Human-readable notes ignored by RPM. Tags — Define data. Scripts — Contain commands to be executed at specific times. Macros — A method of executing multiple commands easily. The %files list — A list of files to be included in the package. Directives — Used in the %files list to direct RPM to handle certain files in a specific way. Conditionals — Permit operating system- or architecture-specific preprocessing of the spec file.