You can use this variable to reference the release version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Yum obtains the value of $releasever from the distroverpkg=<value> line in the /etc/yum.conf configuration file. If there is no such line in /etc/yum.conf, then yum infers the correct value by deriving the version number from the redhat-release package.

You can use this variable to refer to the system's CPU architecture as returned when calling Python's os.uname() function. Valid values for $arch include: i586, i686 and x86_64.

You can use $basearch to reference the base architecture of the system. For example, i686 and i586 machines both have a base architecture of i386, and AMD64 and Intel64 machines have a base architecture of x86_64.

These ten variables are each replaced with the value of any shell environment variables with the same name. If one of these variables is referenced (in /etc/yum.conf for example) and a shell environment variable with the same name does not exist, then the configuration file variable is not replaced.