Red Hat Pushing DNF 5 Into Development For Improving The Package Manager

[Danielsan]

The way PackageKit works doesn't quite jive with how their atomic systems work. [...]

I see...

I don't use Fedora but the SilverBlue caught my attention, when eventually they will fix all the mess with their repos I may give it a chance over a just a simple virtual installation. Everything in that project is smart and clever!

[Britoid]

You were wrong about transactions and history.



When your package manager can install something in under a second, it doesn't really matter. I can understand your attitude towards external tools though. You avoid installing things at all costs when it takes 25 minutes to finish.

How dnf handles transactions and history is a completely different ball game to how pacman handles it.

dnf history is amazing.

[tchiwam]

This should be benchmarked.... In the phoronix suite
apt-get install xyz
Rpm
Yum
Dnf
...

[Britoid]

The way PackageKit works doesn't quite jive with how their atomic systems work. I don't know all the details other than they've been removing PackageKit wherever they can on Silverblue and it's variants. All I know is that there are a bunch of oddball bug reports around it and that It's no longer necessary on my F32 Kinoite atomic desktop.

● ostree://kinoite:fedora/32/x86_64/kinoite
Version: Kinoite 32.1 (2020-02-24T15:54:21Z)
BaseCommit: 8a23e912911f0df8fbf0d4aeb3708b775c1b286825cb5c3284 cd8bcaa0d84b90
GPGSignature: Valid signature by C8D83B6AE4B8685A7290545FDB27818F78688F83
LayeredPackages: ffmpeg-libs gstreamer1-libav gstreamer1-plugin-openh264 gstreamer1-plugins-bad-freeworld gstreamer1-plugins-ugly gstreamer1-vaapi kcalc mozilla-openh264 mpv
smplayer smplayer-themes xorg-x11-drv-amdgpu yakuake
LocalPackages: rpmfusion-free-release-32-0.3.noarch rpmfusion-nonfree-release-32-0.4.noarch

Managed to trim my layered packaged down a bit too. Frickin surprised kcalc doesn't have a Flat. Yakuake I get, but the damn calculator

MOZ_DISABLE_GMP_SANDBOX=1 firefox

Is the command y'all need to know if you use Firefox on Silverblue 32 and want to watch Netflix, Hulu, etc....that won't (or shouldn't) be necessary with the next Firefox release.

Hmm. I watch Netflix on Firefox on Silverblue (you only need ffmpeg-libs for h264 on Firefox btw) and don't use that env setting.

and PackageKit is dead, trying to abstract over all the package managers is a nice idea, but terrible in practice.

[andyprough]

pacman will also happily (and nothing wrong with this), let you destroy your system. dnf (where it's used in mission critical environments) will not.

In what way does pacman "happily let you destroy your system"? I have not seen this behavior. Seems to refuse to install packages with missing or broken dependencies in my experience. Very much like apt, only much faster, much more flexible.

And I have a question about dnf "not" allowing you to mess up your system. We have statements from people above you saying that it did result in dependency hell. Which is it?

These are legitimate questions, I'm not trolling you for once.

dnf is actually available to install on Arch through AUR. I don't know what the purpose of it is, although one of its dependencies is rpm-tools, so maybe its a method of installing rpm's on an Arch system. If there's some real value in it, and its as good as you say, and it doesn't pull in extreme dependencies like systemd or the gnome desktop, I would consider trying it out.

[Britoid]

In what way does pacman "happily let you destroy your system"? I have not seen this behavior. Seems to refuse to install packages with missing or broken dependencies in my experience. Very much like apt, only much faster, much more flexible.

And I have a question about dnf "not" allowing you to mess up your system. We have statements from people above you saying that it did result in dependency hell. Which is it?

These are legitimate questions, I'm not trolling you for once.

dnf is actually available to install on Arch through AUR. I don't know what the purpose of it is, although one of its dependencies is rpm-tools, so maybe its a method of installing rpm's on an Arch system. If there's some real value in it, and its as good as you say, and it doesn't pull in extreme dependencies like systemd or the gnome desktop, I would consider trying it out.

I mean as in, pacman if you tell it to will let you uninstall core packages

dnf won't let you uninstall glibc for example, pacman will.

[andyprough]

I mean as in, pacman if you tell it to will let you uninstall core packages

dnf won't let you uninstall glibc for example, pacman will.

No it won't. I just typed in sudo pacman -R glibc, and it responded with a massive list of errors due to dependencies that would be broken if glibc was removed, and refused to do it.

[skeevy420]

Hmm. I watch Netflix on Firefox on Silverblue (you only need ffmpeg-libs for h264 on Firefox btw) and don't use that env setting.

and PackageKit is dead, trying to abstract over all the package managers is a nice idea, but terrible in practice.

On F32, at least Kinoite, widevine is broken and won't be fixed until the next FF release. Reports show that Nightly or Beta don't need that variable anymore so it'll likely be fixed by the time F32 is actually released. Here's the Arch bug report about it. Both the system Firefox and the Flat Firefox is effected.

On F31, same system, it works just fine and it isn't needed.

I figured adding all the "bad" codecs wouldn't hurt in the long run.

[starshipeleven]

I mean as in, pacman if you tell it to will let you uninstall core packages

dnf won't let you uninstall glibc for example, pacman will.

Like more or less every other package managers ever. I'm not seeing why this dnf feature is so amazing, the only situation where it matters is if your repos are fucked and/or the distro maintainers barfed hard AND the system administrator is a moron.

If you want maximum user-friendlyness just ship read-only system images pre-tested by the distro maintainers and keep all non-core stuff in a flatpak.

[RahulSundaram]

You were wrong about transactions and history.

No he isn't. Dnf history isn't just a history log. It can undo, redo any transaction and has additional metadata including whether that transaction is user initiated etc

https://dnf.readthedocs.io/en/latest...-command-label

It is quite handy