The BOGUS distribution's pms packaging system introduced the use of pristine source code to prepare packages. With Red Hat's early RPP package system and other similar early efforts, software packagers would compile software manually, then run commands to produce a package of that compiled software. Any changes made to the application's original source code were not recorded and would have to be recreated by the next person to package that software. Furthermore, end users wanting to know what changes had been made to the software they were running had no method of accessing that information.

With RPM, Red Hat developed a package system that produced two types of packages: binary and source. Binary packages are compiled software that can be installed and used. Source packages contain the source code for that software, along with a file documenting how that source code must be compiled to produce that binary package. This feature is probably the single most significant difference between modern Linux packaging software (such as RPM) and the packaging software used on other systems (such as the pkg format that commercial Unix systems use). Source packaging makes the job of software packager easier, since packagers can use old source packages as a reference when preparing new versions of those packages. Source packages are also convenient for the end user, because they make it easily possible to change options with which that software was compiled and to produce a new binary package that supports the features the user needs.