dnf versus yum

[Dridi Boukelmoune]

On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 2:50 PM, Dridi Boukelmoune
<dridi.boukelmoune at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 1:04 AM, Kevin Kofler <kevin.kofler at chello.at> wrote:
>> Bill Nottingham wrote:
>>
>>> Matthew Miller (mattdm at fedoraproject.org) said:
>>>> I'm a little lost in the thread, but do you mean that yum's protected
>>>> packages functionality is undocumented? If that is what you mean, check
>>>> the man page. It says:
>>>>
>>>>   protected_packages  This  is  a list of packages that yum should
>>>>   never completely remove. They are  protected  via  Obsoletes  as
>>>>   well as user/plugin removals.
>>>>
>>>>   The  default  is:  yum  glob:/etc/yum/protected.d/*.conf  So any
>>>>   packages which should be protected can do so by including a file
>>>>   in /etc/yum/protected.d with their package name in it.
>>>>
>>>>   Also  if  this  configuration  is set to anything, then yum will
>>>>   protect the package corresponding to the running version of  the
>>>>   kernel.
>>>
>>> While documented, I do find this last bit of behavior extremely odd and
>>> non-intuitive. (And hardcoded, no less.)
>>
>> There should just be a separate protect_running_kernel boolean option, which
>> would default to the above odd behavior for compatibility if not set (but
>> explicitly setting it to either 1 or 0 would override that either way).
>
> Can't the kernel package itself do that ?
>
> I'm thinking about the %preun section (maybe %pretrans ?) where the
> package would know it's being removed, and could find out whether it's
> the running kernel.
>
> One might also want to build a distribution on top of yum/rpm but
> choose a different name for the kernel package like "linux" or
> "linux-kernel".

This reminds me that yum is built on top of rpm, and rpm doesn't mean
linux. I remember my first time on AIX, and the surprising (yet unpleasant)
fact that I had to use (a very old version of) rpm.

>From rpm.org:
> RPM is a core component of many Linux distributions, such as Red Hat
> Enterprise Linux, the Fedora Project, SUSE Linux Enterprise, openSUSE,
> CentOS, Meego, Mageia and many others.
>
> It is also used on many other operating systems as well

>From rpm5.org:
> But RPM is also used for software packaging on many other Unix operating
> systems like FreeBSD, Sun OpenSolaris, IBM AIX and Apple Mac OS X
> through the cross-platform Unix software distribution OpenPKG.

I actually remember a comparison matrix of OpenSolaris forks, some of
them chose /rpm5?/ for package management, but I can't find a link.

I do understand why people would want such features built-in, but it
seems a bit short-sighted. And by short-sighted I don't mean a bad
idea, I mean restricted to Fedora/RHEL and very close distributions. I
don't know yum's goals, but the man page yum(8) and the faq don''t
seem to mention any tight coupling to rhel-like linux distribution.
Again, I'm not saying this would be a bad thing. AFAICT yum is tied
*by essence* to rhel, but I'm also wondering what upstream thinks
about portability, because the whole kernel issue is a portability no-no.

> Dridi
>
>>         Kevin Kofler
>>
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