What have they done to YUM, moving to DNF?
YUM was good – it worked and it allowed admins to easily install and patch software. You could even use it to roll back a bad installation. So, what happened to it? Why was DNF released? What is DNF and how hard will it be to learn a new tool?
First, DNF stands for Dandified YUM and is a rewrite of the YUM software. It was released in 2013 in Fedora 18 and was built to address many issues that YUM was starting to face.
The two most common problems with YUM were performance and RAM usage:
- Poor performance: YUM had performance issues. A lot of this was caused by dependency resolution, the process in which all the packages and their dependencies are put together. This process could take as long as 10 minutes. DNF moved to libsolv, which significantly decreased the time to resolve complex dependencies. This is now more common that ever, with some applications requiring 30+ RPMs.
- High RAM usage: YUM uses a lot of RAM; this...