Hello everyone,
I'm pleased to announce start of DNF 5 development. We are planning to
deliver a module stream or a COPR repo during Fedora 33 development for
early adopters and tool developers and we're hoping in getting a stable
version into Fedora 34.
More details follow.
We've managed to drop a lot of redundant code across the whole DNF stack
in the past years, but we have reached a point when it's nearly
impossible to consolidate the code any further without breaking the
API/ABI. Especially with PackageKit being dead[1], we can't move with
the old "libhif" API in libdnf, because making any bigger changes to
PackageKit is clearly out of scope.
[1]
https://blogs.gnome.org/hughsie/2019/02/14/packagekit-is-dead-long-live-well-something-else/
That's why we decided to start working on a new version of the DNF
stack: DNF 5. And this is the plan:
Priorities
----------
1. Consistency, documentation and user experience is the top priority.
2. Compatibility on the command line level.
3. Compatibility on the API level.
Maintenance
-----------
The existing DNF 4 stack stays in the current Fedoras and Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 8. We'll keep maintaining it in dnf-4-master branches
on GitHub. PackageKit and rpm-ostree will stay on libdnf from the DNF 4
stack.
The existing Python API in DNF
------------------------------
The Python API in DNF stays. We'll do our best to keep it working. If
there is an incompatible change, we'll communicate and document it properly.
The new API in libdnf
---------------------
All business logic will move from DNF (Python) to libdnf (C++). This is
the only way to ensure that package managers work identically across the
whole distribution. We'll start with C++ API and auto-generated Python
bindings via SWIG. We'll focus on the Python bindings which are required
by DNF and we will do our best to provide bindings for Go, Perl5 and
Ruby as well. C API will be created later when the C++ API is stable. At
that moment rpm-ostree will be ported to the new C API.
hawkey
------
Hawkey Python API is going away and will be replaced with libdnf Python API.
DNF
---
DNF stays as the primary command-line package manager. The overall
functionality remains. We don't anticipate any negative impact of the
API rewrite on the end-users. We have built an extensive test suite
(over 1400 scenarios) that will help us to ensure that. The argument
parser and outputs may slightly change in some cases to provide a more
consistent user-experience. All such cases will be properly documented.
microdnf
--------
Microdnf is becoming important because it's part of many containers
due to its small footprint. We're getting feedback that users would
appreciate something closer to DNF. We'll focus on implementing a subset
of DNF's functionality and improving the user experience. 100% feature
parity with DNF is currently out of scope.
DBus service
------------
DNF team has decided to create a new DBus service replacing PackageKit
to provide an interface to GUI applications. It's probably going to take
a while because we're planning to start from scratch.
Roadmap (tentative)
-------------------
* Mar 2020 - making the bigger API changes, upstream code barely compiles
* May 2020 - COPR repo with first development snapshots
* Jun 2020 - F33 module available for early adopters and tool developers
* Oct 2020 - DNF 5 landing in F34 Rawhide
* Feb 2021 - DNF 5 replacing DNF 4 in stable Fedora
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