Ben Cotton, a Fedora Program Manager at Red Hat, announced plans to switch Fedora Linux by default to the DNF5 package manager. In Fedora Linux 39, the packages dnf, libdnf, and dnf-cutomatic are set to be replaced with the DNF5 toolkit and the new libdnf5 library. The proposal has not yet been reviewed by the FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), which is responsible for the technical part of Fedora distribution development.
In its time, DNF replaced Yum, which was entirely written in Python. In DNF, demanding low-level performance functions were rewritten and moved to individual C libraries such as hawkey, librepo, libsolv, and libcomps, while the framework and high-level components remained in Python. The DNF5 project aims to unify the existing low-level libraries, rewrite the remaining package management components in C++, and extract core functionality into a separate libdnf5 library, creating bindings around this library to maintain the Python API.
Using C++ instead of Python will eliminate a significant number of dependencies, reduce the toolkit size, and improve performance. Higher performance is achieved not only through the use of machine code compilation but also due to an improved transaction table implementation, optimized loading from repositories, and database restructuring (separating system state databases from operation history). The DNF5 toolkit is detached from PackageKit, and instead, a new background process DNF Daemon is used, replacing PackageKit's functionality and providing an interface for package and update management in graphical environments.
The redesign will also enable the implementation of various enhancements that improve the package manager's usability. For instance, the new DNF features more visual progress indicators for operation execution; support for using local RPM packages in transactions; the ability to include information from scripts embedded in packages in the transaction execution reports (scriplets); and a more advanced input autocompletion system for bash.
Forrás: opennet.ru
