Using RPM, you upgrade individual components of a system without completely reinstalling. When Red Hat releases a new version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, users do not have to reinstall in order to upgrade. RPM allows intelligent, fully-automated, in-place upgrades of your system. Configuration files in packages are preserved across upgrades so users do not lose customizations. There are no special upgrade files needed to update a package because the same RPM file is used to install and upgrade the package.

RPM provides querying options that allows you to search through your entire RPM database for all packages or just for certain files. You can also easily find out what package a file belongs to and from where the package came. The files contained in the package are in a compressed archive, with a custom binary header containing useful information about the package and its contents. RPM queries the headers quickly and easily.

Another feature is the ability to verify packages. If you are worried a file related to a package was deleted, you can verify the package to check the status of the files it provides. The verification notifies you of any anomalies. If errors do exist, you can reinstall the files easily. Modified configuration files are preserved during reinstallation.

A crucial design goal of RPM is to allow the use of pristine software sources, as distributed by the original authors of the software. With RPM, the pristine sources can be packaged, along with any patches that were used, plus complete build instructions. This is an important advantage for several reasons. For instance, if a new version of a program is released, you do not necessarily have to start from scratch to make it compile. You can look at the patch to see what you might need to do. All the compiled-in defaults and changes made to get the software to build properly are easily visible using this technique.

Keeping sources pristine may seem important only to developers, but it results in higher quality software for end users, as well.