Mageia To Offer DNF, But Will Keep Using URPMI By Default

The RPM-based Mageia Linux distribution has decided to offer Fedora's DNF forked version of Yum in their next major release.

While Mageia 6 will be offering dnf, it's not going to be the default but will just be present on the system for those wanting to use it. The urpmi command and Mageia's existing software management tools will remain the defaults for the "foreseeable future."

The Mageia blog post explains as the benefits of adding support for Fedora's DNF project, "DNF ships with a well-structured command line interface, an easy-to-use and very complete API, a dozen core plugins, and a dozen contributed plugins. As a consequence of the work required to adopt DNF, Mageia is now broadly compatible with a wider array of tools for managing RPM-based systems, due to the use of tooling that is common to other major RPM-based Linux distributions (such as Fedora and openSUSE)."

Mageia developers are also hoping to see support added to Fedora's COPR service (the third-party, PPA-like package system) for Mageia.