dnf versus yum

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Sat, Jan 4, 2014 at 5:37 AM, Mattia Verga <mattia.verga at tiscali.it> wrote:
> Il 04/01/2014 11:20, Panu Matilainen ha scritto:
>
>> On 01/04/2014 11:50 AM, Mattia Verga wrote:
>>>
>>> This is the first time I heard of DNF.
>>> Looking at the page where differences between DNF and yum are explained
>>> (http://akozumpl.github.io/dnf/cli_vs_yum.html) my question is: do we
>>> really need DNF to replace yum?
>>
>>
>>> Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that DNF is no more than yum with
>>> some different standard behavior and a couple of new command line
>>> options. So why replace yum? If those changes are good why simply don't
>>> change standard options in yum or add those new commands to yum?
>>
>>
>> That document, as the name implies, explains the current differences in
>> *cli* behavior to yum, as in "things that might cause surprises for
>> long-time yum users". Dnf doesn't exist to tinker with some cli differences
>> just for the heck of it, the main reasons and goals have to do with the
>> underlying depsolving engine and API, see eg
>>
>> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DNF#Detailed_Description
>> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/users/2014-January/444874.html
>>
>> This and the other thread on fedora-users does make it clear that
>> background and goals of dnf needs to be more clearly communicated though.
>>
>>     - Panu -
>
> Thank you.

Inventing new paradigms is always painful. This one seems.... not
really worth it. There's far more effective work that could be done
with yum, for example improving the way yum handles "repodata" to to
stop downloading such bulky files if they're actually altered in size
and/or date, not merely if the cache is expired, to reduce wasted
bandwidth and disk churn on virtualized clients.