The point of the exercise was to not use rpmlib. The comparison to JPEG is inappropriate because it has dozens of interoperable implementations. Formats define

The point of the exercise was to not use rpmlib. The comparison to JPEG is inappropriate because it has dozens of interoperable implementations. Formats defined by a single implementation are sickly and much less viable (remember the lessons of http://libmng.com/ http://libmng.com/ ?); I applaud the reverse engineering effort from the article.