F22: Merge yumdb for yum->dnf migration?

Casey Jao casey.jao at gmail.com
Fri Jan 30 13:03:12 UTC 2015


Hello,

Currently dnf and yum have their own yumdb's, under /var/lib/dnf/yumdb and
/var/lib/yum/yumdb respectively.  Among other things, these databases
record whether a package was explicitly installed by the user or pulled in
automatically as a dependency of another package. This information is used
by the "dnf autoremove" and "yum autoremove" routines to determine which
additional packages can be safely removed. As Packagekit currently writes
to yum's yumdb, "dnf autoremove" will not work correctly when run on
packages that were installed using Gnome software, and vice versa.

Thus we should consider merging the yumdb's as part of the F22 transition
to a unified dnf/hawkey package management backend. From a brief
inspection, the two yumdb's on my system appear to have the same structure.
All that would need to be done is decide how to proceed in the rare event
when the same package appears in both yumdb's. On my machine, make and
pkgconfig show up in both yumdb's with the install reason marked as "group"
by dnf and "dep" by yum. Since dnf knows more than yum due to its tracking
of groups (
http://dnf.baseurl.org/2014/04/23/how-groups-are-handled-in-modern-day-dnf/),
I'd be inclined to let dnf's version take precedence.

Best,
Casey
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