Yum vs. DNF Is Still Causing Headaches For Fedora Logistics

While the DNF package manager as the "next-generation Yum" has been in development for over a half-decade and has been the default over traditional Yum for a number of Fedora releases, it's still causing headaches for some and a subset of users still desiring that DNF be renamed to Yum.

On newer Fedora installations, yum does already point to dnf and the experience these days at least from my personal perspective has been quite good with DNF being the default now since Fedora 22... I haven't had any real DNF troubles now in years, though with RHEL8 Beta even still calling it "yum", there are some oddities from being so ingrained to Yum for the past two decades especially for system administrators.

One of the legacy remnants of Yum on modern Fedora systems is that repository files are still placed in /etc/yum.repos.d. There's been a new proposal issued for instead making the de facto location /etc/distro.repos.d with Fedora 31 later this year. DNF for a while has already supported this /etc/distro.repos.d as a fallback location for the parsing of repository files, thus the F31 proposal isn't much of a technical change.

This proposal has raised a fair amount of objections with some developers/users still not being fond of the DNF name and desiring a rename back to Yum, legacy scripts using the old "yum" location, confusion for system administrators also maintaining RHEL/EL boxes, and related concerns. Those in favor of the proposal seem to be just about removing the old Yum branding.

At this stage no decisions have been made, but if you take to heart the DNF vs. Yum debate, this mailing list thread is where the discussion is happening.