DNF Still Advancing As Experimental Yum For Fedora

[RahulSundaram]

How to get a next generation YUM in minutes:
1.) Fork zypper (front-end only, not libzypp)
2.) Change the zypper commands to match YUM
3.) Change the name of the zypper fork to YUM.
Done.

A dependency resolver is very much a core component and you can't just swap one with another and really expect it to work and that is why a transition to libsolv needs a lot of testing and time to mature.

yum's dependency resolving logic is different. SUSE has a number of distribution specific tweaks to RPM which aren't used outside the distribution but used by zypper and won't work in Fedora at all. Also yum has a number of commands including history etc which have no equivalent in zypper. In addition to that, yum is not just a end user tool but also provides the API that is used by all the different yum plugins, the build tools like mock and koji, qa tools and Anaconda, the installer itself.

The good news is that when dnf becomes mature, libsolv as the key library will be shared by both Fedora and openSUSE and RPM developers have some potential plans merge it upstream as well.

[deanjo]

How to get a next generation YUM in minutes:
1.) Fork zypper (front-end only, not libzypp)
2.) Change the zypper commands to match YUM
3.) Change the name of the zypper fork to YUM.
Done.

They would be better off just dropping yum and adopting zypper and libzypp.

[Awesomeness]

How to get a next generation YUM in minutes:
1.) Fork zypper (front-end only, not libzypp)
2.) Change the zypper commands to match YUM
3.) Change the name of the zypper fork to YUM.
Done.

[RahulSundaram]

Not really sure if Yum needs a replacement as much as configured differently upon default installation.
The slowest part is that it doesn't use a cache like apt by default, using -C makes it just as fast as apt.

dnf is just a prototype and the plan is for this to literally become the new yum so you wouldn't really notice that it has been replaced. dnf syncs the metadata using a systemd timer by default so wouldn't have to wait for it to be updated first typically. Fedora drops older packages beyond two versions from the master server to keep mirrors happy (its still retained in the build system so you can get it if you really want to) so if metadata isnt updated first, you might run into issues.

@elanthis More or less, yeah. Copying and tweaking for slight differences. It is a easy fix.

[elanthis]

Bash completion should take minutes to fix if it's CLI compatible with yum. Copy the completion script and s/yum/dnf/g.

[peppercats]

Not really sure if Yum needs a replacement as much as configured differently upon default installation.
The slowest part is that it doesn't use a cache like apt by default, using -C makes it just as fast as apt.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: DNF Still Advancing As Experimental Yum For Fedora

DNF is the experimental fork of the Yum package manager that premiered in Fedora 18. While much hasn't been heard of this experimental Yum replacement since its debut, work on it has still been progressing and is turning out to be in great shape, is slowly approaching feature-parity with Yum, and is faster...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTM3NTA