A Modularity rethink for Fedora

Posted Jan 4, 2018 18:46 UTC (Thu) by sgallagh (guest, #80524)
In reply to: A Modularity rethink for Fedora by farnz
Parent article: A Modularity rethink for Fedora

Most notably, it's much higher-performance than having multiple repositories (and easier for a user to manage). Among other things, yum/dnf scales very poorly to additional repositories (particularly in terms of retrieving the metadata). With modules, all of the content lives in the same repository with common repodata which will be much faster.

As for management, knowing which set of repositories must be enabled in order to get your particular framework is complicated; with Modules, we can set dependencies (similar to RPMs), so that if you want e.g. the "rails:5" module, it will automatically enable the "ruby:2.4" module implicitly. Add to that the ability to get a quick and easy view of all available modules (rather than something like COPR or Ubuntu PPAs where you have to go *find* a new repo) and I think the value over-and-above multiple repos becomes obvious.

A Modularity rethink for Fedora

Posted Jan 5, 2018 13:38 UTC (Fri) by Conan_Kudo (subscriber, #103240) [Link] (1 responses)

> Among other things, yum/dnf scales very poorly to additional repositories (particularly in terms of retrieving the metadata).

This is news to me. My Fedora system is able to handle more than a dozen repositories (COPR repos, third party applications, and Fedora main repositories) rather well.

Sure, it could be better (most of the DNF developer team would like to get rid of librepo and libcomps to do something less convoluted), but it works very well.

A Modularity rethink for Fedora

Posted Jan 5, 2018 14:02 UTC (Fri) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> My Fedora system is able to handle more than a dozen repositories (COPR repos, third party applications, and Fedora main repositories) rather well.

Unlike yum, dnf downloads the filelists regardless of whether it needs to and that alone is a very significant problem for people with low bandwidth. I know there has been some discussions over this but so far, this hasn't been really addressed.