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

The Yum successor DNF on Fedora and Red Hat Linux distributions (among other select RPM distributions) is soon embarking on its fifth major iteration.

Red Hat developers are starting work on DNF 5 as the next major version of this RPM package management solution. DNF 5 is being developed now in order to allow for API/ABI breakage, particularly with moving away from PackageKit and in its place developing a new DBus service to provide an interface to GUI-based package management applications.

With DNF 5, much of the heavy lifting is also being transitioned from DNF's Python code-base to the C++-based libdnf library. Hawkey's Python API is also being replaced with a libdnf-based Python API as part of this planned version.

For end-users the important aspect is maintaining compatibility as the command line level as well as in the user experience. DNF 5 is a big undertaking but they hope by early 2021 that DNF 5 will be ready to replace DNF 4. The first version to see DNF 5 would be Fedora 34 in spring of 2021 but a Copr repository is expected for DNF 5 on Fedora 33.

More details on the DNF 5 planning via the Fedora mailing list.