I may be a sentimental old fool, but I feel a vague sense of sadness at the removal of yum. Seth Vidal, the original author of yum (or, the fellow who forked it from Yellow Dog Updater, and made it yum), was one of the sweetest, brightest, and most helpful developers I've interacted with in my long history with Open Source. He was killed a few years back when he was hit by a car while cycling, and yum has never quite been the same without him, but I occasionally think of him when using yum.<p>I wish they'd keep the yum name, since dnf is still based on yum, even if a lot of the innards have been replaced. Also, "dnf" is not at all awesome to say out loud, while "yum" is among the most awesome commands to say out loud.
Out of curiosity, why not fix something if broken? Why is there is always a half baked alternative that has a different set of problems. Instead of replacing what is perceived broken you can just fix it also keeping the good parts. I have several systems deeply vested in in the yum/rpm ecosystem and I see very little chance that a new package manager is going to offer that much new features that I need while keeping the features I already like from yum.<p>From the article:<p>"undocumented API, broken dependency solving algorithm and inability to refactor internal functions. The last mentioned issue is connected with the lack of documentation. "<p>Well some of them I don't care about as a user of yum some of them I can verify not true (documentation) and some of them I care about and it works for my use-cases (dependency solving algorithm).
Serious question, because I am admittedly ignorant to the plusses and minuses of the different package managers.<p>If you're going to swap out: why not switch to apt? What does apt lack that DNF is going to provide? This seems like one of those low hanging fruit where standardization across distributions would make sense.
Former libzypp/zypper developer here.<p>It was not mentioned in the post that dnf is based on the openSUSE dependency SAT solver (libsolv) that was created by Michael Schroeder years ago and that powers libzypp and zypper since openSUSE 11.0.<p>The dnf developers built a thin layer on top of it, called hawkey, and then build dnf in python on top of hawkey.<p>One of the biggest innovations of libsolv is not only the SAT based solver but also the .solv format which allows to store package metadata for big amounts of packages in an efficient way and operate the solver directly on it.<p><a href="https://github.com/openSUSE/libsolv" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/openSUSE/libsolv</a>
> Yum is dead<p>Seems more like `dnf.baseurl.org` is dead (it's down right now).<p>Google cache: <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PiRy8WdU6HYJ:dnf.baseurl.org/2015/05/11/yum-is-dead-long-live-dnf/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:PiRy8Wd...</a>
So, like, what is a package manager and what does it need to do? All the distros have one. All the lanaguages have one. Why do we have so many of these things and is all the complexity necessary? All our configuration management tools try to abstract the differences. The list goes on on and with these things. As I start down the path of doing more and more operations/systems administration I find myself asking the question over and over: What are we doing with our lives?
Yum is "as dead" as one might think Fedora 22 is "production ready!" The reality is RHEL 6, RHEL 7 and many other distributions use Yum and they are not going to go away anytime soon.
DNF is THE worst acronym to pick for package management tool :D<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Did_Not_Finish" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Did_Not_Finish</a>
Good to know, thanks Hacker News. Better "dependency solving" is appreciated. Though I stopped using Fedora, I assume this will make it to CentOS eventually.
503s for me, here's the article on the Internet Archives Wayback Machine: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150517152126/http://dnf.baseurl.org/2015/05/11/yum-is-dead-long-live-dnf/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20150517152126/http://dnf.baseur...</a>
Linux is a horrible mess. The more I try to do with it, the more the mess reveals itself. Wayland vs X11, Python 2 vs Python 3, init vs systemd, ifconfig vs ip addr, these are all examples where as a new user you have to learn the new and the old system just to be on a level playing field and it's is far, far too much.