New Fedora Package Manager Still on Track

by Ostatic Staff - May. 23, 2013

Last year the news circulated that Fedora was introducing a new package manager. Despite having made it into the last release, Fedora 18, DNF is still considered experimental. It is a fork of Yum that "uses libsolv via hawkey for a backed." Developers think the DNF is the answer to their packaging woes and Rahul Sundaram recently blogged about the progress.

Some of the benefits of DNF over Yum include:

* more compatibility with other languages

* better performance & memory consumption

* leaner codebase than Yum

Rahul Sundaram, Fedora contributor, said, "In the course of the last several months, I have filed over a dozen bug reports and new feature requests mostly to bring dnf in line with what yum already supports." Some of the features it doesn't yet support include:

*Delta RPM

* history undo

* parallel downloads

* auto-remove

* bash completion

Despite the soon-to-be-added features, Sundaram implies that DNF is right on track to eventually replace Yum. Its commands are the same or compatible with Yum and Sundaram says he's put an alias for it in his .bashrc so as not to "have to throw away my muscle memory." Little else was said at this time, but the main point of the post is that DNF is shaping up nicely and is the future of Fedora package management.