DNF 1.0 Released, Declared Stable Package Manager For Fedora

The day is coming where DNF is replacing Yum as the default package manager on Fedora Linux. DNF 1.0 was just released today to mark the point of stability and it being ready to take over Yum's responsibilities with the upcoming Fedora 22 release.

Jan Šilhan released DNF 1.0 today (along with DNF-PLUGINS-CORE 0.1.7) and with the 1.0 release it's "considered as stable and ready to be the main command line package manager in Fedora 22 and later." DNF has been offered as an experimental package manager available since Fedora 18, but with the Fedora 22 release due out soon it will become the default package management choice.

DNF is designed as a next-generation Yum and mostly is a drop-in replacement to Yum and relying on Hawkey. DNF was forked from Yum 3.4. DNF supports all the same basic commands of DNF while being faster, by using Hawkey they have a cleaner API and more bindings, better performance with its integration of libsolv, and there's various other improvements. Contrary to other DNF acronyms, Fedora developers ended up saying it stands for "Dandified Yum."

There's been many different views about DNF -- including whether it should be able to remove system-critical packages -- but with time it's evolved quite well. In my testing of DNF, particularly over the past several months with Fedora 21, DNF has been working quite well and is faster than Yum.

The DNF 1.0 release adds HTTP authentication support, plug-in enhancements, and other improvements. You can find out more details on DNF 1.0 via the release notes.

Fedora 22 is expected to be released later this month and besides switching over to DNF there's also many other new features to F22.