Why write a new package manager anyway?

Posted Jan 16, 2014 18:42 UTC (Thu) by dowdle (subscriber, #659)
In reply to: Why write a new package manager anyway? by jhoblitt
Parent article: DNF and Yum in Fedora

Another thing to consider... to the best of my knowledge, dnf is a fork of yum... so it is yum as a separate project... in which they are doing a few things... namely switching resolver libraries... and spending more time on cleaning up the code and getting rid of as much cruft as possible. Some of that cruft are features they don't think are really used/needed. As everyone knows... as code ages it does gain a bit of cruft. :)

So dnf to me is really just a streamlining of yum and trying to make it better rather than being a completely different package manager.

Why write a new package manager anyway?

Posted Jan 16, 2014 19:15 UTC (Thu) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (3 responses)

What matters here is unification and if that means all distribution need to sacrifice somewhere in the stack and if that leads to us having to kick out yum/dnf in Fedora then so be it.

Red Hat just has to swallow that pill.

Why write a new package manager anyway?

Posted Jan 16, 2014 19:50 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

Dowdle is right that DNF is just a yum fork and not a new package manager but some of that unification is happening already since Panu apparently is looking into merging dependency solving logic (from libsolv) into RPM directly. Red Hat switched from home grown up2date to community developed yum before and could switch again if it is really warranted but it is likely that they are just going to continue to improve yum (via the dnf project as of now).

However if you really want to talk about unification, I don't see Red Hat switching to DEB format or Debian switching to RPM format anytime soon but either of these formats are just tarballs with some additional metadata.

The interesting problems are the large amount of differences in other layers higher up (packaging guidelines, choice of components, home grown solutions like Debian menu etc) and if you unify them all, you will have a single Linux distribution. Not going to happen though but the differences are getting somewhat nullified via other deployment models (language specific ones are prominent now) and also emerging sandbox (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QTgxakyUVFMkvr-xFY2Xg...) and container based models(ex: Docker).

GNOME Software's answer appears to be abstract it out and have plugins support more than just the native packaging format of the distributions. It is a changing landscape and we will see what such efforts evolve into.

Why write a new package manager anyway?

Posted Jan 16, 2014 21:23 UTC (Thu) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (1 responses)

In anycase there is nothing preventing Fedora to switch oh wait yes there is...

"if you unify them all, you will have a single Linux distribution."

For quite sometime now ( couple of years ) the plumbing layer has been slowly moving to the direction of becoming whole which is an move which I see significantly strengthen the GNU/Linux ecosystem but I disagree that we wind up with a single Linux distribution since I philosophize and say what deviates distributions now is not so much the bits but more their philosophy and the communities surrounding each philosophy and those will always exist which also is good.

I agree it's going to be interesting to see if an to what extent GNOME Software changes the landscape for distributions shipping Gnome and distributions in general and I would not be surprised if it became it's own distribution in that process as well.

Why write a new package manager anyway?

Posted Jan 18, 2014 10:09 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

" In anycase there is nothing preventing Fedora to switch oh wait yes there is..."

Finish your sentence if you want others to follow your train of thought.

" For quite sometime now ( couple of years ) the plumbing layer has been slowly moving to the direction of becoming whole which is an move which I see significantly strengthen the GNU/Linux ecosystem"

The plumbing layer is consolidating however your idea of consolidating packaging formats is certainly not happening. There is now ever more than before.

" I agree it's going to be interesting to see if an to what extent GNOME Software changes the landscape for distributions shipping Gnome and distributions in general and I would not be surprised if it became it's own distribution in that process as well."

It would have a software center that would act as a distribution point but there is no real reason it would morph into a Linux distribution on its own. I don't see the logical reason or the commercial incentive to do that.