Fedora Users Still Have Mixed Feelings Over DNF

[kaprikawn]

The complaints about the name may seem trivial, but that goes both ways, it's entirely trivial to change the name to something less crappy. So why not just do it?

[devius]

So, anyone knows what's wrong with yum that couldn't ever be fixed and so the only possible solution was to write a new package management program?

[Daktyl198]

So, anyone knows what's wrong with yum that couldn't ever be fixed and so the only possible solution was to write a new package management program?

Nothing. From what I understand (as a non-Fedora/Yum user) is that DNF is an evolutionary step rather than a revolutionary one. It uses a back-end that is supported by several distros among other things (greater feature set... eventually, etc)

[Ericg]

The complaints about the name may seem trivial, but that goes both ways, it's entirely trivial to change the name to something less crappy. So why not just do it?

The name's only temporary. It's gonna be renamed to 'yum' when its made the default.

[Ericg]

So, anyone knows what's wrong with yum that couldn't ever be fixed and so the only possible solution was to write a new package management program?

DNF is a fork of yum, it wasn't written from scratch. It rips out the custom library that the yum developers originally wrote and uses libsolv which is a library that Suse wrote for dependency management. It also re-architects a few things, like allowing for multiple simultaneously downloads.

[Morpheus]

I know that it's not widely used anymore, but anoyone knows why Fedora/redhat guys did not go with urpmi that Mandriva/Mageia uses ? Back at the old days of Mandrake/Mandriva it seemed to work pretty well.

[Rubberman]

Testing DNF

Just remember, use a virtual machine when you are testing DNF. At least it won't be the end of the world if you nuke your kernels! :-)

[rdnetto]

Also, I imagine having your package manager be a Python program that's dependant on a working python VM is a huge problem and a huge dependency since for some ungodly reason the RPM distros are using in companies quite often. So needing a python VM to do any package management is bloat versus what it should be (a C/C++ program or any of the statically compiled&linked) programming language based to have no external dependencies in order to be executed.

Sabayon has a Python-based package manager, and it hasn't had any problems. It's about as fast as apt-get, though searches seem a lot slower than eix.

[RahulSundaram]

I know that it's not widely used anymore, but anoyone knows why Fedora/redhat guys did not go with urpmi that Mandriva/Mageia uses ? Back at the old days of Mandrake/Mandriva it seemed to work pretty well.

Red Hat didn't create yum. Red Hat Linux which Mandriva was a fork of, used up2date and Seth Vidal was a Duke University system admin who wrote Yum and when Fedora was created, the project adopted it due to Seth's participation and RHEL being downstream of Fedora moved to yum as well. In any case, dnf is just a experimental fork of yum to test out libsolv.

[JanC]

Also, I imagine having your package manager be a Python program that's dependant on a working python VM is a huge problem and a huge dependency since for some ungodly reason the RPM distros are using in companies quite often. So needing a python VM to do any package management is bloat versus what it should be (a C/C++ program or any of the statically compiled&linked) programming language based to have no external dependencies in order to be executed.

You can still use rpm to install packages if you broke Python somehow.