Approved: Fedora 22 Will Replace Yum With DNF

[froyo]

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2) YUM is annoyingly slow when compared to apt-get

On point number 2, I got flamed pretty bad. Total denial, of course "YUM is just as fast as apt-get!!! Blah! Blah!

Not being a sensitive soul, I just ignored it. But I'm enjoying seeing that apparently Fedora's developers agree with me, and want to replace YUM with something faster.

However, I'm not patting myself on the back for my brilliant revelation that YUM is slow. I'm probably about the millionth person to have noticed this problem and commented about it. YUM has been around for like, what, 10 years? I was seeing comments about YUM being slow within days of its first release.
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I use mostly Fedora nowadays, but I know (and like) Debian quite well. My fealing is that yum is not that much slower than apt-get (I am happy to be shown that I am wrong by comparing actual numbers!). What is true for sure is, that zypper (openSUSE, also rpm based) is way faster than yum.

So it is still conceivable, that YUM is slow and you were wrong at the same time. )))

[Kostas]

Anybody knows what will happen to yumex?

Try looking around for a yumex next dnf copr, pretty noteworthy improvement both in terms of speed and design .

[blackiwid]

I use mostly Fedora nowadays, but I know (and like) Debian quite well. My fealing is that yum is not that much slower than apt-get (I am happy to be shown that I am wrong by comparing actual numbers!). What is true for sure is, that zypper (openSUSE, also rpm based) is way faster than yum.

So it is still conceivable, that YUM is slow and you were wrong at the same time. )))

Thats exactly what I thought, k I am not so used to suse they have horrible interfaces so thats their problem but I also think that debian is if at all only slightly faster or the same speed.

While if you count in that u have to manaly search old kernels and remove them in debian u use therefor much more time (or is that problem ubuntu only I doubt it).

And there is another thing u have to type in apt-get update && apt-get upgrade to do the same as yum upgrade does. so while u do type in the extra 22 chars fedora ist often already half done.

Ok maybe its a bit slower, but I cant understand that people take this as criteria of a distro. As example between debian and fedora u have extremly different distributions, one is very close to upstream the other on the other end of the spectrum. Even if you use Debian unstable in freeze times the packages become extremly old (1 year old). So isnt something like that 100x more important if your apt-get upgrade does take 30 or 40 seconds?

And he has some other missconcepts:

1. he said "I am happy that fedora devs know have desided that they should now develop a alternative to yum", no, you choose the wrong tenses. The desided years ago that they want to develop something and they are done with it now... they just not included it yet into the distro. Or not even that its in their repositories at least since F20 if not way before, it was just not default yet thats all.

2. important packages are not in fedora, thats very unconcrete. I could claim the same and give a concrete example:
profile-sync-daemon a very important programm for me is in fedora but not in debian (not even unstable).

I think the main problem u have maybe is that u dont know about rpmfusion, most packages like xbmc that are not 100% unproblematic or maybe even some aditional free packages are in there its a bit like ubuntu-community repos.

But there are even more copr repositories and stuff like that, like gnome3 .12 packages. but most of the time rpmfusion is the answer. ok for owncloud I have also a extra repo. but thats more or less it ^^ whereby owncloud is in official fedora I installed that I guess because there was a newer version.

[Lysius]

2) YUM is annoyingly slow when compared to apt-get

I also had that impression when updating an Ubuntu system, that it was faster than on Fedora. But I guess it is caused by additional security checks by yum (this "Transaction Test" for example). I can't remember to have gotten into an inconsistent state after package updates with yum. But on Ubuntu it can (or at least could) happen half way through the installation that it notices "hey, this file is already packaged elsewhere, I'll just leave that half installed and quit with an error".

[DrYak]

My fealing is that yum is not that much slower than apt-get (I am happy to be shown that I am wrong by comparing actual numbers!). What is true for sure is, that zypper (openSUSE, also rpm based) is way faster than yum.

Zypper uses a completely different solver (one that DNF will be adapting into Fedora 22). They actually use a boolean satisfiability solver, whereas other package manager use some simple heuristic.

Since they switched to this approach, the package manager has never barfed on dependencies. (as is: in needing user intervention to first manually select/deselect dependencies or even install/uninstall packages in a prior round, so that the manager will accept a new modification. Zypper will either transparently accept them, or provide a clear explanation of a contradicting request and provide a few sensible solutions).

Example of things that zypper can achieve: when a new distribution of opensuse arrives, I simply update all the repositories URLs to the newest version (I use tons of 3rd party repositories to get newer version of some software or to circumvent things that should be illegal in the US but are permited in my jurisdiction - mainly patents on multi-media codecs).
And this... just works flawlessly. After updating the URLs, I can fire up the actual package manager, and fine tune things to my liking (for example, remove old deprecated things that do not exist anymore and that I don't need to be kept around, etc.) and while I'm doing this, on each click on a package (select/deselect), zypper will automatically re-scan the whole dependency network to make sure that the installation remains consistent. (On each click, zypper check thousands of package to be upgraded from the newer URLs, including situations like deprecation of subsystems, software that isn't provided anymore in the 3rd party repository because the newer distribution provides it mainline, etc.) Each full rescan is only a couple of seconds max, so I can interactively tune things with dependencies feed-back/auto change.

That is the same computations that takes a few minutes when you ask yum to install something, and yum spends a few minutes to check if dependencies are ok or if yum needs to install extra dependencies or complain about conflict (and not actually being able to give a meaningful alternative). The same things that takes minutes with yum takes 1-2 seconds with zypper and is done on the fly while you interactively click around in the package manager UI.

That's what is coming to Fedora 22 with DNF. As someone who has to manage custom CentOS / Fedora derivative, I can't wait.

So while I'm on this topic, maybe I should ask: "How does one request Fedora developers to make a package?" One that I particularly need but couldn't find is "Aegisub."

Well, if you feel like it, the best way would be to do a first draft your self.
(It's really not that much difficult. You need to write a SPEC file which is basically a list of steps about how to install the software. You can use a service like opensuse's Open Build System to compile it as your very own 3rd party repository for Fedora).

[graysky]

2. important packages are not in fedora, thats very unconcrete. I could claim the same and give a concrete example:
profile-sync-daemon a very important programm for me is in fedora but not in debian (not even unstable).

Yes, I am supplying it in a PPA: https://github.com/graysky2/profile-sync-daemon

No idea how to go about getting a package added to one of the ubuntu official repos.