Live data from Hacker News

Yum is dead, long live DNF

dnf.baseurl.org

61–70 of 128 posts

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#61
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.

If portage/gentoo guys were not treating portage as if it was running on gazillion of GHz CPU, they would have a shot at making portage compete with other systems. Don't say it is the best. Not by any stretch.

I feel ashamed that for the last ten years I could not find a kind word to the portage developers. For what is worth, they don't care.

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#62

I may be a sentimental old fool, but I feel a vague sense of sadness at the removal of yum. Seth Vidal, the original author of yum (or, the fellow who forked it from Yellow Dog Updater, and made it yum), was one of the sweetest, brightest, and most helpful developers I've interacted with in my long history with Open Source. He was killed a few years back when he was hit by a car while cycling, and yum has never quite…

> Also, "dnf" is not at all awesome to say out loud, while "yum" is among the most awesome commands to say out loud. Indeed, to me, saying "dnf" out loud suggests "did not finish," which is the opposite of what you want from a package repository tool!

Did not find [package]!

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#63

So, like, what is a package manager and what does it need to do? All the distros have one. All the lanaguages have one. Why do we have so many of these things and is all the complexity necessary? All our configuration management tools try to abstract the differences. The list goes on on and with these things. As I start down the path of doing more and more operations/systems administration I find myself asking the qu…

People don't know what they want package mangers to do and they had much less of a clue back when the fragmentation started. So we got rpm and deb. Arch decided these were too complicated when you wanted a rolling release so they have their own package manager. Programming languages need to have their package managers work on more than just Linux, so they make their own cross platform ones, but since the devs are only thinking about their own language they don't make something cross language.

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#64

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…

[deleted]

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#65
post #29

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.

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...

What? how is this better? what all of this is is apt making users say yes to everything such as config changes. I'm totally fine with that. Sure it's an extra line or 2 when automating, but I don't see it as bad.

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#66
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.

You mean the better system that inspired portage, BSD Ports, right?

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#67

I may be a sentimental old fool, but I feel a vague sense of sadness at the removal of yum. Seth Vidal, the original author of yum (or, the fellow who forked it from Yellow Dog Updater, and made it yum), was one of the sweetest, brightest, and most helpful developers I've interacted with in my long history with Open Source. He was killed a few years back when he was hit by a car while cycling, and yum has never quite…

Ditto. I mess Seth a great amount and this too makes me sad a bit -- though his code and advice lives on in scores of people.

His belief in Ansible being a decent idea really kept me going with it after the first 2 months or so, otherwise I might not have continued it as a side project, and over the course of several years, he helped me a ton with various issues and was an amazing sounding board, including sharing a lot of advice when I as being plagued by nuisance CVE reports and wondering what to do about them. We had occasional arguments and he was usually right, and we always resolved things. (We had also previously worked on Func together with Adrian Likins, who wrote most of up2date, which was also a great experience - Seth knocked out most of the fun SSL parts). Back then used to meet around Duke to come up with crazy patent ideas to supplement our low Red Hat salaries (mine was anyway), and ... yeah, so much fun.

At his service, what was super amazing was pretty much everyone said the same thing about how he had helped them, dozens upon dozens of people, and it was really one of the most moving things I've ever seen. One of the few that made you come out saying "whoa" and wanting to be a better person and care about helping other people more than I did. And I think I did. Or I'm trying hard to.

Seth got a lot of hell for yum and shared many of my frustrations with the nature of the OSS community at times, but I still prefer it than a lot of idioms in apt. Things like yumdownloader, createrepo, --enablerepo, --disablerepo, and many things like it, just made it click for me, and it worked so well. And working with people like him at Red Hat made it really feel special to be there and to be able to learn from them.

I think about him every time I run yum, and every time something in apt doesn't work the way I want. Folks should just enjoy the metadata refresh time as a reason to get coffee, and blame PackageKit for your silly yum locks. (ALWAYS. REMOVE. PACKAGEKIT.)

And I agree on keeping the name, and it doesn't clash with "disjunctive normal form" that way too :) .. not that I remember what that is so much.

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#68

So, like, what is a package manager and what does it need to do? All the distros have one. All the lanaguages have one. Why do we have so many of these things and is all the complexity necessary? All our configuration management tools try to abstract the differences. The list goes on on and with these things. As I start down the path of doing more and more operations/systems administration I find myself asking the qu…

packaging software for distribution at scale is really hard and really manual

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#69

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.

> Is "very slow depsolving" even relevant? Try upgrading from major versions and seeing what happens. It's absolutely relevant

Rather than forcing us all to install an outdated distro and do a major version upgrade then trying to guess the particular element of the process you find disconcerting could you may be tell us?

Re: Yum is dead, long live DNF

#70

I may be a sentimental old fool, but I feel a vague sense of sadness at the removal of yum. Seth Vidal, the original author of yum (or, the fellow who forked it from Yellow Dog Updater, and made it yum), was one of the sweetest, brightest, and most helpful developers I've interacted with in my long history with Open Source. He was killed a few years back when he was hit by a car while cycling, and yum has never quite…

> Also, "dnf" is not at all awesome to say out loud, while "yum" is among the most awesome commands to say out loud. Indeed, to me, saying "dnf" out loud suggests "did not finish," which is the opposite of what you want from a package repository tool!

Well, they eventually did finish Duke Nukem: Forever, right?
Post reply on HN