DNF Still Advancing As Experimental Yum For Fedora

[uid313]

Debian

Port DNF to Debian and put it in the Debian repository?

[Awesomeness]

Interesting that there are more distributions using zypper. But what does Red Hat have to do with all that to begin with?

If you don't know what Red Hat has to do with Fedora, try to get internet in your cave and look it up.

[GreatEmerald]

If you don't know what Red Hat has to do with Fedora, try to get internet in your cave and look it up.

Red Hat uses Fedora as a base for RHEL. They also provide hosting for Fedora. They also hire people to work on software. But what package management tools to use in Fedora is the decision of Fedora, not Red Hat.

[finalzone]

That's quite a strange statement considering that a few non-SUSE distributions already switched to zypper years ago, including the Fedora-derived Ark Linux distribution. I don't have a Fedora installation at hand right now but I'm sure you do. So why don't you add the upstream Fedora repo, install zypper, and tell us what exactly doesn't work.
http://download.opensuse.org/reposit...ead/Fedora_17/

There were several attempts in the past, see

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=447740

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=729200

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=729201

DNF was made during Fedora 16 timeframe.

[RahulSundaram]

That's quite a strange statement considering that a few non-SUSE distributions already switched to zypper years ago, including the Fedora-derived Ark Linux distribution. I don't have a Fedora installation at hand right now but I'm sure you do. So why don't you add the upstream Fedora repo, install zypper, and tell us what exactly doesn't work.

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/zypp:/Head/Fedora_17/

Then add them to zypper. Red Hat has a great reputation for working upstream. Strange to see Canonical mentality creep into RH. “Upstream doesn't provide every last bit we want? Roll out our own solution instead.”


Deprecate the yum API and rather use the resources to port the other stuff to libzypp.

Before DNF development started zypp was the only LSB-compatible package manager to be actively developed among all mainstream distributions.
If the roles were reversed, I'd tell a SUSE engineer exactly the same thing: Drop your home-grown solution is favor of of the superior one by a 3rd party.

I have used a zypper build for Fedora and have ran into many many issues and even reported a few. There has been several attempts to bring zypper into Fedora and none of them panned out for various reasons. Either zypper has improved drastically meanwhile or other distributions are patching it.

zypper is nowhere close to being used or developed by all mainstream RPM using distribution. Fedora or RHEL or Mandriva or Mageia isn't using it and SUSE does most, if not all of the development in zypper.

Also, dnf isn't rolling out isn't own solution. its a prototype that uses same library as zypper (libsolv) and will become the new yum eventually and Fedora developers are coordinating with the libsolv developers in SUSE and the primary developer was even in the last Fedora conference and presented on the SUSE tools. Cleaning up the yum API as necessary and doing a slow transition while retaining command line and configuration compatibility with yum makes it easier for users to adopt. You seem to be underestimating the work involved considering the number of tools within Fedora that use the yum API. A wholesale switchover just isn't feasible for Fedora and you shouldn't really expect that to happen.

[AdamW]

If the roles were reversed, I'd tell a SUSE engineer exactly the same thing: Drop your home-grown solution is favor of of the superior one by a 3rd party.

What Rahul's trying to tell you is that it's not practical to just do that. But the whole point of dnf is to attempt to increase the amount of co-operation and code re-use between projects: the aim is for openSUSE and Fedora to use a common dependency resolution system (libsolv). dnf is an improvement in exactly the direction you're trying to advocate.

[tangram]

So basically YUM best features aren't available? Delta RPMs, history undo, parallel downloads, auto-remove and bash completion. For me these are deal breaking namely history undo.