On Thu, 2020-03-05 at 07:44 +0100, Fabio Valentini wrote:
----- Original Message -----
> From: "Neal Gompa" <ngompa13@gmail.com>
> To: "Development discussions related to Fedora" <devel@lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, March 4, 2020 11:01:43 PM
> Subject: Re: Announcing start of DNF 5 development
>
> On Wed, Mar 4, 2020 at 4:37 PM Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek
> <zbyszek@in.waw.pl> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Mar 04, 2020 at 07:03:01PM +0100, Daniel Mach wrote:
> > > Hello everyone,
> > > I'm pleased to announce start of DNF 5 development. We are planning
> > > to deliver a module stream or a COPR repo during Fedora 33
> > > development for early adopters and tool developers and we're hoping
> > > in getting a stable version into Fedora 34.
> > >
> > >
> > > More details follow.
> > >
> > >
> > > We've managed to drop a lot of redundant code across the whole DNF
> > > stack in the past years, but we have reached a point when it's
> > > nearly impossible to consolidate the code any further without
> > > breaking the API/ABI. Especially with PackageKit being dead[1], we
> > > can't move with the old "libhif" API in libdnf, because making any
> > > bigger changes to PackageKit is clearly out of scope.
> > >
> > > [1]
> > > https://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2019/02/14/packagekit-is-dead-long-live-well-something-else/
> > >
> > >
> > > That's why we decided to start working on a new version of the DNF
> > > stack: DNF 5. And this is the plan:
> > >
> > >
> > > Priorities
> > > ----------
> > > 1. Consistency, documentation and user experience is the top priority.
> > > 2. Compatibility on the command line level.
> > > 3. Compatibility on the API level.
> > >
> > >
> > > Maintenance
> > > -----------
> > > The existing DNF 4 stack stays in the current Fedoras and Red Hat
> > > Enterprise Linux 8. We'll keep maintaining it in dnf-4-master
> > > branches on GitHub. PackageKit and rpm-ostree will stay on libdnf
> > > from the DNF 4 stack.
> > >
> > >
> > > The existing Python API in DNF
> > > ------------------------------
> > > The Python API in DNF stays. We'll do our best to keep it working.
> > > If there is an incompatible change, we'll communicate and document
> > > it properly.
> > >
> > >
> > > The new API in libdnf
> > > ---------------------
> > > All business logic will move from DNF (Python) to libdnf (C++). This
> > > is the only way to ensure that package managers work identically
> > > across the whole distribution. We'll start with C++ API and
> > > auto-generated Python bindings via SWIG. We'll focus on the Python
> > > bindings which are required by DNF and we will do our best to
> > > provide bindings for Go, Perl5 and Ruby as well. C API will be
> > > created later when the C++ API is stable. At that moment rpm-ostree
> > > will be ported to the new C API.
> > >
> > >
> > > hawkey
> > > ------
> > > Hawkey Python API is going away and will be replaced with libdnf Python
> > > API.
> > >
> > >
> > > DNF
> > > ---
> > > DNF stays as the primary command-line package manager. The overall
> > > functionality remains. We don't anticipate any negative impact of
> > > the API rewrite on the end-users. We have built an extensive test
> > > suite (over 1400 scenarios) that will help us to ensure that. The
> > > argument parser and outputs may slightly change in some cases to
> > > provide a more consistent user-experience. All such cases will be
> > > properly documented.
> > >
> > >
> > > microdnf
> > > --------
> > > Microdnf is becoming important because it's part of many containers
> > > due to its small footprint. We're getting feedback that users would
> > > appreciate something closer to DNF. We'll focus on implementing a
> > > subset of DNF's functionality and improving the user experience.
> > > 100% feature parity with DNF is currently out of scope.
> > >
> > >
> > Hi,
> >
> > the roadmap is ambitious, but not impossible. Good luck!
> >
> > > Roadmap (tentative)
> > > -------------------
> > > * Mar 2020 - making the bigger API changes, upstream code barely compiles
> > > * May 2020 - COPR repo with first development snapshots
> > > * Jun 2020 - F33 module available for early adopters and tool developers
> > > * Oct 2020 - DNF 5 landing in F34 Rawhide
> > > * Feb 2021 - DNF 5 replacing DNF 4 in stable Fedora
> >
> > > DBus service
> > > ------------
> > > DNF team has decided to create a new DBus service replacing
> > > PackageKit to provide an interface to GUI applications. It's
> > > probably going to take a while because we're planning to start from
> > > scratch.
> >
> > Do you plan to make normal 'dnf' calls go through the dbus api?
>
> This would be interesting, but wouldn't that make using DNF in rescue
> situations impossible?
You mean due to the regular DBus daemon & system + session bus not running
in some system rescue scenarios, right ?
While possibly a bit tricky I could imagine some fallback mechanism where
invocation of the CLI tool starts it's own DBus session & instance of the DNF
service when it detects that the regular system & session buses are not available.
Anaconda does something similar when it starts in Mock during some phases of the
compose process & finds no system bus is available - it starts it's own DBus daemon
process and uses that.
Wow, using dbus to communicate between CLI binary and the shared library sounds like an awful idea. Why not do a simple shim around the shared library instead? (And not introduce another 2 moving parts into a critical system component: dnf dbus service and dnf dbus client)
Fabio
Aside of others, it will help to solve a dead locks when DNF is accessing system resources and DB. Right now, Anaconda is launching DNF/YUM in a separate process because otherwise we will be locked by Python GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) on every C call in the DNF library from python. Another reason is to replace PackageKit by something which is not dead or have a possibility to replace it.
Second benefit is DBus is language agnostic so you could use any programming language you want to use DNF.
Jirka
I think my message was a bit ambiguous. I meant to say:
I hope you don't use the dbus daemon to communicate between /usr/bin/dnf and /usr/lib64/libdnf.so.666, which would only introduce 3 more moving parts.
As for providing a dbus-based API in addition to the shared library, of course I'm all for that, for all the reasons you stated in your response.
And in another message in this thread, somebody already clarified that the dnf binary won't use libdnf over dbus, but link to the shared library directly. So my concerns seem to be invalid. :)
Fabio