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Yum is dead, long live DNF

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Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#11

Post by rwmj »

stonogo wrote: post #7
tw04 wrote: post #2

Serious question, because I am admittedly ignorant to the plusses and minuses of the different package managers. If you're going to swap out: why not switch to apt? What does apt lack that DNF is going to provide? This seems like one of those low hanging fruit where standardization across distributions would make sense.

The lower the stakes, the stronger the feelings. C.f. text editing.

Considering I spend probably half my time using a computer in an editor, I'd say the stakes couldn't be higher.

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#12

Post by baghira »

rwmj wrote: post #5
tw04 wrote: post #2

Serious question, because I am admittedly ignorant to the plusses and minuses of the different package managers. If you're going to swap out: why not switch to apt? What does apt lack that DNF is going to provide? This seems like one of those low hanging fruit where standardization across distributions would make sense.

It would have been better to switch to zypper. Both dnf and zypper use a SAT solver for very fast depsolving. Yum and apt don't and both have very slow depsolving. Zypper also directly supports rpm, and would have unified the package managers on Fedora, OpenSUSE and the enterprise Linux distros RHEL and SUSE.

As far as I can tell the fedora guys wrote libhawkey and dnf to reach some sort of middle ground, as switching to zypper would have implied breaking everything (i.e. all the scripts admins use, rewriting parts of anaconda, etc). The compatibility is not perfect, and in fact a fair amount of people complained (see some discussion on phoronix). As far as the parent post is concerned, to switch to apt would imply switching to deb, which would be a massive change. RPM is simply too different, both in positive (the possibility of changing target directory and of rolling back) and in negative (dependency specification is still rudimental compared to .deb, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNwNF19oFqM). And as rwmj14 said, libsolv is better.

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#13

Post by kasabali »

tw04 wrote: post #2

Serious question, because I am admittedly ignorant to the plusses and minuses of the different package managers. If you're going to swap out: why not switch to apt? What does apt lack that DNF is going to provide? This seems like one of those low hanging fruit where standardization across distributions would make sense.

Because switching just the package manager will yield no benefit at all. Having apt as the common package manager among Debian derivatives is meaningful because those distributions get most of their packages from Debian, so they use not only the same package manager, but also same packaging format, same file system hierarchy, same package names/package splitting. All Fedora derivatives, OpenSUSE and Mandriva(?) would agree on using dnf but that would provide no significant benefit at all (other than reusing muscle memory).

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#14

Post by [deleted] »

lloydde wrote: post #3
tw04 wrote: post #2

Serious question, because I am admittedly ignorant to the plusses and minuses of the different package managers. If you're going to swap out: why not switch to apt? What does apt lack that DNF is going to provide? This seems like one of those low hanging fruit where standardization across distributions would make sense.

Apt is part of a tool chain that is extreme Unix philosophy. With this we benefit from backwards compatibility and continuing to use our muscle memory, but it also means that if say you want to find out which uninstalled package provides a specific file it means installing another tool.

[deleted]

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#15

Post by jlarocco »

rwmj wrote: post #5
tw04 wrote: post #2

Serious question, because I am admittedly ignorant to the plusses and minuses of the different package managers. If you're going to swap out: why not switch to apt? What does apt lack that DNF is going to provide? This seems like one of those low hanging fruit where standardization across distributions would make sense.

It would have been better to switch to zypper. Both dnf and zypper use a SAT solver for very fast depsolving. Yum and apt don't and both have very slow depsolving. Zypper also directly supports rpm, and would have unified the package managers on Fedora, OpenSUSE and the enterprise Linux distros RHEL and SUSE.

Is "very slow depsolving" even relevant? In my experience that part of installation and remove is a very small part of the overall installation or removal time and goes by so fast I've never really noticed it.

Even if dnf and zypper are 1000x faster than apt there, that alone wouldn't convince me to use them.

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#17

Post by XorNot »

lloydde wrote: post #3
tw04 wrote: post #2

Serious question, because I am admittedly ignorant to the plusses and minuses of the different package managers. If you're going to swap out: why not switch to apt? What does apt lack that DNF is going to provide? This seems like one of those low hanging fruit where standardization across distributions would make sense.

Apt is part of a tool chain that is extreme Unix philosophy. With this we benefit from backwards compatibility and continuing to use our muscle memory, but it also means that if say you want to find out which uninstalled package provides a specific file it means installing another tool.

apt-file is pretty damn lightweight when you get to "another tool" stakes.

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#18

Post by StavrosK »

jlarocco wrote: post #15
rwmj wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would have been better to switch to zypper. Both dnf and zypper use a SAT solver for very fast depsolving. Yum and apt don't and both have very slow depsolving. Zypper also directly supports rpm, and would have unified the package managers on Fedora, OpenSUSE and the enterprise Linux distros RHEL and SUSE.

Is "very slow depsolving" even relevant? In my experience that part of installation and remove is a very small part of the overall installation or removal time and goes by so fast I've never really noticed it. Even if dnf and zypper are 1000x faster than apt there, that alone wouldn't convince me to use them.

Not only that, but it sounds like someone can just add a solver to apt, whereas repackaging the entire linux ecosystem to use a different format is going to be a bit more difficult.

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#19

Post by detaro »

StavrosK wrote: post #18
jlarocco wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is "very slow depsolving" even relevant? In my experience that part of installation and remove is a very small part of the overall installation or removal time and goes by so fast I've never really noticed it. Even if dnf and zypper are 1000x faster than apt there, that alone wouldn't convince me to use them.

Not only that, but it sounds like someone can just add a solver to apt, whereas repackaging the entire linux ecosystem to use a different format is going to be a bit more difficult.

These distros use RPM for decades (or at least more than one) now, for them switching to apt would be repackaging everything. There seems to be an apt-fork for RPM, but that hasn't been updated in years.

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#20

Post by darkstalker »

tw04 wrote: post #2

Serious question, because I am admittedly ignorant to the plusses and minuses of the different package managers. If you're going to swap out: why not switch to apt? What does apt lack that DNF is going to provide? This seems like one of those low hanging fruit where standardization across distributions would make sense.

Everyone should switch to Portage. It's like a superset of every package manager.
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