The Latest Fedora Debate: DNF Can Remove Systemd, RPM

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Latest Fedora Debate: DNF Can Remove Systemd, RPM

Now that systemd is running along nicely within the Fedora camp, the latest heated topic is over DNF with it expected to replace Yum in Fedora 22...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTcyODE

[kaprikawn]

I've been reading the systemd flamers too much. When I read the headline, I assumed it was a feature that they put in to appease the people who don't want systemd, like it would replace it with something else. Only after reading the article did I realise it meant that it would bork your system.

Someone enlighten me, when they say it's fast and modern, what exactly does that mean? I've never ran 'sudo pacman -Syu' or 'sudo apt-get upgrade' and thought 'boy, is this upgrade a slow piece of crap I wish they'd speed it up'. In fact, it's usually connecting to the server doing the downloads which takes the most time. In what respect is it fast? And what does the modernity entail, what benefits does it have over pacman, aptitude and the rest?

[birdie]

Too much fuss about exactly nothing.

Yum won't remove systemd/glibc/rpm 'cause they are hardcoded.

Such preferences can be hardcoded into DNF as well. I guess it will take just a few lines of code to actually implement this limitation against the stupid.

[Ancurio]

I've been reading the systemd flamers too much. When I read the headline, I assumed it was a feature that they put in to appease the people who don't want systemd, like it would replace it with something else. Only after reading the article did I realise it meant that it would bork your system.

Someone enlighten me, when they say it's fast and modern, what exactly does that mean? I've never ran 'sudo pacman -Syu' or 'sudo apt-get upgrade' and thought 'boy, is this upgrade a slow piece of crap I wish they'd speed it up'. In fact, it's usually connecting to the server doing the downloads which takes the most time. In what respect is it fast? And what does the modernity entail, what benefits does it have over pacman, aptitude and the rest?

You must have never used yum then.. I love its command line beyond anything, but the fact that it updates its package lists every day on the first use makes me yearn for apt-get's speed..

[rohcQaH]

When I read the headline, I assumed it was a feature that they put in to appease the people who don't want systemd

I'm sure that's just a coincidence and not clickbait.

Anyway, I've managed to break both gentoo (portage) and ubuntu (apt-get) by entering commands that seemed reasonable and safe at the time. With great power comes great responsibility, so I'm not sure how safe a system-tool for root needs to be.

I've never ran 'sudo pacman -Syu' or 'sudo apt-get upgrade' and thought 'boy, is this upgrade a slow piece of crap I wish they'd speed it up'.

Have you tried emerge -avuDNt world?

[kaprikawn]

Have you tried emerge -avuDNt world?

Touche! I have actually, but I've never used Gentoo for any length of time, I would install it, get frustrated and then try something else. I understand use flags and I totally get why someone would want them, but I never found them to be anything other than a pain to deal with. I like the idea of Gentoo, I guess it's just not for me.

You must have never used yum then.. I love its command line beyond anything, but the fact that it updates its package lists every day on the first use makes me yearn for apt-get's speed.

Ah, ok, that makes sense. No, I don't think I've used yum. The only time I think I might have used it is on Yellow Dog Linux on the PS3, did that use it? If it was, I wouldn't have noticed how slow it was, everthing was slow on that.

[Ericg]

I've been reading the systemd flamers too much. When I read the headline, I assumed it was a feature that they put in to appease the people who don't want systemd, like it would replace it with something else. Only after reading the article did I realise it meant that it would bork your system.

Someone enlighten me, when they say it's fast and modern, what exactly does that mean? I've never ran 'sudo pacman -Syu' or 'sudo apt-get upgrade' and thought 'boy, is this upgrade a slow piece of crap I wish they'd speed it up'. In fact, it's usually connecting to the server doing the downloads which takes the most time. In what respect is it fast? And what does the modernity entail, what benefits does it have over pacman, aptitude and the rest?

The speed aspect comes from a few places..

1) The backend that handles the dependency resolution is a library taken from openSUSE and has, supposedly, already had the crap optimized out of it by the SUSE developers.

2) Leaner API, more optimized API.

2a) Yum's codebase has accumulated a fair amount of cruft and untested code paths because of backwards compatibility. This is an oppurtunity to rip out the older, untested, broken code and trim the application down to whats necessary and needed.

3) Memory and other optimizations that, for one reason or another, were deemed too dangerous to slap into the yum codebase before they cleaned it up.

4) Parrellized downloads by default. Yum typically (i THINK there's an extension for this, but im not sure) downloads packages one at a time, DNF downloads 3-4 at a time usually and when one gets done it just loads up the next one.




The other issue at hand is the fact that DNF can remove the Kernel / systemd / RPM. Which side of the argument you are on pretty much comes down to which motto you tend to follow... Either "Users are idiots who need handholding" vs "With great power comes great responsibility." The problem given there is the fact that a broken package managed to tear apart the entire system... That package maintainer needs to be double checking his work. There is no way in hell that the package should've gotten packaged up, tested, and pushed to Updates. It better NOT have managed to get enough good Karma to go from Updates --> Stable.

[Ericg]

Straight from the openSUSE Wiki... http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Libzypp_satsolver

The dependency solver tries to solve dependencies without user intervention based on two basic rules

Fulfill the install/remove requests given at start
Keep the (dependencies of the) installed system consistent

Since the solver treats every package alike, these rules have some major and sometimes unexpected implications. A broken dependency might result in removal of lots of packages - the resulting system is still consistent by highly unusable.

[Chousuke]

Eh, working as intended

The user requested the removal of pcre. Thus, the package manager computed the necessary operations to accomplish that request. Granted, it's not a good experience for a user who happens to be completely clueless about the underlying system and blindly okays everything.

To me, the original poster feels like a troll who was looking for an excuse to bash Fedora in some way. There are ways to fix this issue, but hardcoding a set of essential packages in dnf would just paper over a weakness in the package format.

I know dpkg handles this problem quite effortlessly with the "essential" priority class, but I am not sure if RPM has anything similar that could be used.

[Chousuke]

Oh, and Re DNF speed... I use Fedora nowadays (I like to stay on the edge with my desktop systems, but I'm not going to compile source packages so Arch etc. are right out. Fedora strikes the best balance), and I wholeheartedly agree that Yum feels like molasses compared to eg. aptitude on Debian; I prefer to use dnf because it processes packages faster and downloads them faster. I have enough bandwidth for parallelism to matter. Downloading lots of small files serially is very inefficient.