DNF Still Advancing As Experimental Yum For Fedora

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[uid313]

Debian

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

[GreatEmerald]

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.?

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

[Awesomeness]

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.

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/

Also yum has a number of commands including history etc which have no equivalent in zypper.

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.?

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.

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.

[mark45]

The slowest part is that it doesn't use a cache like apt by default, using -C makes it just as fast as apt.

Ah yes the wacko idea to update each time from the net that trickled down without notice upon desktop users from the server-side.

I sometimes ask myself - how come crappy decisions like this happen, then I remember how nautilus by default (until like 2011) opened each dir in a new window on double click (thanks to Canonical for overriding this idiocy in Ubuntu by default), or how gedit by default shits out a hidden backup copy for every edited file ever littering your desktop computer with random garbage - and I give up.

To companies: don't allow server side mentality/bigotry/paranoia to automatically trickle down onto the desktop, put a common sense filter in between.