It will take while until this proposal is implemented

Jun 13, 2014 13:28 GMT  ·  By

Red Hat developers are preparing to make some big changes in the upcoming Fedora 22 operating system, and one of them is the actual replacement of Yum.

Yum is probably one of the most used tools in Fedora and in all the other distributions that are based on this operating system. Developers forked Yum a while ago into DNF and now it looks like the time has come to make the official replacement.

“This change will be completely transparent for users that use only the graphical package management tools. For anybody using the command line directly there will be some differences, but all the important operations are available with DNF, using the same CLI syntax.”

“The majority of tasks on this change are completed. Some plugins and API calls still need to be added. The Anaconda payload implementation needs more testing, Fedora Test Day for this is pending,” said Red Hat's Jaroslav Reznik.

The decision to replace the packaging tool in a Linux distribution is a big one, and this is one of the reasons why developers are waiting until Fedora 22 to implement it. Keep in mind that Fedora 21 might arrive in October, if all goes well.

This replacement won't have any real impact for regular users because the commands will remain the same in terminal, so it's likely that many Fedora users won't even know that Yum is gone.