AIX rpm dependency

AIX filesets/packages information is stoted in ODM, however you could install packages in rpm format as well on AIX.  RPM uses it's own database to store information on installed packages.

To interlink the shared libraries from AIX and resolve dependencies for rpm's - AIX uses a virtual/psuedo rpm called AIX-rpm

$ rpm -q AIX-rpm
AIX-rpm-6.1.5.0-6

Major version of this rpm is based on oslevel of AIX. This rpm has nofiles, but it provides all installed libraries,shells to resolve dependencies. You can verify this via

$ rpm --provides -q AIX-rpm

Whenever new LPP filesets are installed/updated, this information in the psuedo rpm needs to be updated. This is done via a script - "/usr/sbin/updtvpkg"

If you are running into some issues installing rpm's with respect to missing shared libraries, it's possible that you need to re-generate new AIX-rpm. Depending on the installed software this script could take long time to complete