dnf update vs Software Udpates

[Suvayu Ali]

On Mon, Jul 20, 2015 at 10:44:52AM +0200, Jan Zelený wrote:
> 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.

It seems a bit strange when frontends can dictate backend requirements.
Also seems like a lot of duplicated effort, increased chances of bugs,
and what not.

Anyway, thanks for your confirmation.

Cheers,

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.