DNF Replace Yum

               The Fedora project has announced that "YUM" will be replaced by "DNF." DNF is currently available in Fedora 20 and is tentatively scheduled to replace Fedora’s package manager Yum entirely by the end of 2014.

                YUM (stands for Yellowdog Updater, Modified) is a free and open-source command-line based utility released under GNU General Public License and is primarily written in Python Programming language. YUM was developed to manage and update RedHat Linux at Duke University, later it got wide recognition and become the package manager of RedHat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, CentOS and other RPM based Linux distribution. It is often called as “Your Package Manager”, unofficially frequently by Linux Professionals.

Short comings of Yum that led to the foundation of DNF:

1. Dependency resolution of YUM is a nightmare and was resolved in DNF with SUSE library ‘libsolv’ and Python wrapper along with C Hawkey.
2. YUM don’t have a documented API.
3. Building new features are difficult.
4. No support for extensions other than Python.
5. Lower memory reduction and less automatic synchronization of metadata – a time taking process.

Ale¨ Kozumplík, the developer of DNF project is a RedHat Employee. He says:he has no choice other than forking YUM and develop DNF. The YUM package maintainer were not ready to implement these changes. YUM has about 59000 LOC whereas DNF has 29000 LOC (Lines of Code).