FESCo Approves The Fedora 41 Switch To DNF5

[Old Grouch]

So you don't know the meaning of gaslighting either huh

Errh...providing steady illumination by combustion of a supply inflammable gas augmented by a thermo-luminescent mantle?

[White text->]Cultural references can be opaque to foreigners and/or (younger) people not exposed to the culture.[/<-White text]

[Britoid]

I came here thinking there was a discussion about dnf and dnf5, unfortunately I was wrong.

I for one am looking forward to this, microdnf was always faster and smaller than dnf and great for container usage, where as dnf4 was slow and required pulling python into containers, and would blow up if your python install went funny, often preventing you from using the package manager itself to fix it.

[reba]

I came here thinking there was a discussion about dnf and dnf5, unfortunately I was wrong.

I for one am looking forward to this, microdnf was always faster and smaller than dnf and great for container usage, where as dnf4 was slow and required pulling python into containers, and would blow up if your python install went funny, often preventing you from using the package manager itself to fix it.

That I did not know. A package manager depending on Python... wow... brave

[oleid]

That I did not know. A package manager depending on Python... wow... brave

There are other package managers written in python, e.g. Gentoo's portage. There are even build tools written in python, eg meson.

Portage is quite smart when updating so that you won't run into a situation where you don't have a broken python installation, in case that's your fear.

[cynic]

There are other package managers written in python, e.g. Gentoo's portage. There are even build tools written in python, eg meson.

Portage is quite smart when updating so that you won't run into a situation where you don't have a broken python installation, in case that's your fear.

wait! you can have a Python installation that is not broken? 🤔

[Britoid]

That I did not know. A package manager depending on Python... wow... brave

A large chunk of the functionality is in C/C++ (libdnf) and Python serves as the frontend, but I've had a few systems where people have tried guides online for building Python projects which messed up their Python install and broke DNF in the process.

and it's a pain to fix, the Python ecosystem ngl is just awful, even NPM and Composer are more reliable.

[User42]

You mean if you don't sudo pip install? Yes pretty easy...

As for dnf4, Python was used as glue and for the parts where C really doesn't make sense (like file parsing). All the hard work people loath dnf4 so much for is done in the C part. Last time I profiled the thing, thinking "oh surely they do something weird", I was very disappointed to see that I had to read C, not python, to understand what the program does that takes so much time and that it all boils down to algorithms that scake dreadfully with the number of packages. That was fine 20 years ago but now...

Dnf5 does better partially through better algorithms and bruteforce (they now use multithreading)... I'm not sure throwing more computing power is a solution but at least it makes things a bit faster and I don't have to be reminded of pacman every single time I update a Fedora (or not so much anyway).

[User42]

A large chunk of the functionality is in C/C++ (libdnf) and Python serves as the frontend, but I've had a few systems where people have tried guides online for building Python projects which messed up their Python install and broke DNF in the process.

and it's a pain to fix, the Python ecosystem ngl is just awful, even NPM and Composer are more reliable.

With that line of reasoning, C/C++'s ecosystem is just awful too because some guides online tell you you can sudo rm -rf your system and that breaks your system.

At what point does sudo pip look like a good idea? Really, that's beyond me. It's your proverbial people asking you to jump off a cliff. It's not as if pip could install stuff in a user-owned environment, or conda could, or virtualenv, and probably quite a few others. Don't blame the tool when using it wrongly.

It's the same as people complaining Linux is not stable, that they need to reinstall their distro almost every month... Then you dig a bit... And it turns out there is that tool they use but instead of using the package, they curl-pipe-sudo an install script as per instruction... Except that said script messes up with the system, installing out-of-distro versions of libraries that are not tracked by the package manager and doing random modifications because the script writer did not know better...

God, I understand more and more why Google stripped sudo from Android. Not only do people have no notion of basic sysadmin tasks but it's never them too, always the tool.

[szymon_g]

is there any reason to not use DNF5 in the (upcoming) fedora 40? I know it's not installed by default, but what features will I lose if i'll install and use it instead of its older version?

[oleid]

wait! you can have a Python installation that is not broken? 🤔

Sure, if you don't manually break it by working against your system's package manager it should be fine out of the box.