DNF vs. YUM

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Thu, 13 Mar 2014 11:09:31 -0700
Joe Zeff <joe at zeff.us> wrote:
> On 03/13/2014 07:04 AM, Mark Haney wrote:
> > Making RPMs and yum more efficient is great, don't get me wrong.
>
> Making them faster != making them more efficient if they end up not 
> updating everything because they're using obsolete metadata.  That's 
> just pushing the time needed for the upgrade into the future and 
> pretending it doesn't exist.

Well to be fair, updating the machine is not the only thing one can do
with yum. I often find myself querying about a package with
"yum info packagename" or listing/removing installed packages, etc. And
each time it's a major pain to wait for the metadata to get updated,
especially since it is completely unnecessary for those operations.

So I can see a valid point for usecases where you don't want to update
metadata every time you run yum.

Besides, keeping the machine up-to-date is something that should be
done automatically in the background, by cron, PackageKit or
otherwise, and the ordinary user should not need to be bothered with
the metadata. Sooner or later metadata will get refreshed and updates
will flow to the machine. I really don't see a difference if it happens
today or tomorrow.

And finally, for the enthusiast cli folks (like myself) who yum update
manually, inspect what is about to be updated before proceeding, etc.,
it should not be a big problem to yum clean metadata immediately before
yum update. So I don't see a very valid case for the old yum behavior
anyway. And the increase in speed with dnf can be substantial.

Best, :-)
Marko