dnf versus yum

[Kevin Kofler]

Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
> 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.

The thing is, the default package managers we show to our users are all 
based on PackageKit, and using yum with PackageKit has always been a source 
of all sorts of trouble. The main issue is that yum only has a Python API. 
With dnf, PackageKit can skip the Python layer entirely and instead uses the 
underlying Hawkey library, which is written in C, directly. PackageKit being 
a C program, this is much more convenient and efficient. And all the stuff 
written in Python that currently uses the yum Python API is simply getting 
ported to the very similar dnf Python API. So API-wise, dnf should be making 
everybody happy.

        Kevin Kofler