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Yum is dead, long live DNF

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Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#21

Post by vezzy-fnord »

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.

Ironically, package formats have already been standardized: it's RPM, as per the Linux Standard Base (LSB).

Naturally no one fully obeys it, because LSB is a mediocre standard in general.

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#22

Post by vezzy-fnord »

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.

Given that the package manager is the backbone that makes the Linux distribution (in most cases), it's not low stakes at all.

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#23

Post by icebraining »

[deleted] wrote: post #14
lloydde wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

How so? I don't think you can do that with apt alone, you need apt-file (which is a separate tool).

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#24

Post by istvan__ »

Out of curiosity, why not fix something if broken? Why is there is always a half baked alternative that has a different set of problems. Instead of replacing what is perceived broken you can just fix it also keeping the good parts. I have several systems deeply vested in in the yum/rpm ecosystem and I see very little chance that a new package manager is going to offer that much new features that I need while keeping the features I already like from yum.

From the article:

"undocumented API, broken dependency solving algorithm and inability to refactor internal functions. The last mentioned issue is connected with the lack of documentation. "

Well some of them I don't care about as a user of yum some of them I can verify not true (documentation) and some of them I care about and it works for my use-cases (dependency solving algorithm).

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#27

Post by rwmj »

istvan__ wrote: post #24

Out of curiosity, why not fix something if broken? Why is there is always a half baked alternative that has a different set of problems. Instead of replacing what is perceived broken you can just fix it also keeping the good parts. I have several systems deeply vested in in the yum/rpm ecosystem and I see very little chance that a new package manager is going to offer that much new features that I need while keeping…

dnf is a very heavily modified yum. Parts of dnf have a Duke University copyright (because Duke was the place yum came from originally). They took the opportunity to do a very big rewrite however so a lot of code has changed, and the command line is also quite a bit different.

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#28

Post by StavrosK »

detaro wrote: post #19
StavrosK wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess it's true that one wouldn't be able to just install debs on RedHat, for example, without modification. Alas.

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#29

Post by rwmj »

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.

Red Hat (the company) and RPM (the format) predate Debian, although only by a few months. Also RPM is a much better format than deb, and that's speaking as someone who regularly makes packages using both.

I would also say that dnf and zypper are better package managers than apt, in as much as they are faster and easier to automate. Compare the code here:

https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/1.29.43/custom...

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