dnf update vs Software Udpates

[Jan Zelený]

On 20. 7. 2015 at 09:43:45, Suvayu Ali wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 20, 2015 at 09:00:16AM +0200, Jan Zelený wrote:
> > > On Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 8:32 PM, Javier Perez <pepebuho at gmail.com> 
wrote:
> > > > This is weird.
> > > > Software Updates on the Control Panel says that there are 39 updates
> > > > available
> > > > But when I run dnf update it says "Nothing to do". What gives?
> > 
> > IIRC the Software Updates widget does not use dnf to check for updates,
> > therefore it's likely it has a different set of metadata at its disposal.
> > As you figured out, cleaning the MD cache helps.
> 
> I'm getting a bit confused lately.  How many package managers does
> Fedora have these days?  IIRC, until a year or two back, it was the same
> backend (yum), but many front ends (yumex, all the packagekit based
> frontends for the different desktops).  Did packagekit start doing the
> backend bits itself?
> 
> From your message I understand that there are at least two different
> package managers, both are "Official" to some capacity.  For cli users
> like myself, it's dnf, for gui users it's something packagekit based.
> 
> Am I mistaken?

You are not, that's pretty much it. We have had two independent software 
management stacks since F21 where PackageKit (PK) switched from yum backend to 
libhif.

At the moment PK and dnf share libraries for depsolving and downloading stuff 
but other than that the code is independent. IIRC the reason is that dnf is 
written in Python and that is not acceptable for PackageKit because of the new 
Gnome Software front end. It is likely that PK and dnf will share more code in 
the future but that's more of a very long term plan.

Thanks
Jan