DNF 3: better performance and a move to C++

Posted Mar 29, 2018 22:19 UTC (Thu) by k8to (guest, #15413)
In reply to: DNF 3: better performance and a move to C++ by roc
Parent article: DNF 3: better performance and a move to C++

Hmm, dnf doesn't run with privileges? How does it perform the installs?
This might be dnf 101, but I'm not finding much about dnf having privilege separation on the interwebs.

DNF 3: better performance and a move to C++

Posted Mar 30, 2018 6:22 UTC (Fri) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link] (3 responses)

Non-privileged package management is something I have often missed. In Fedora an ordinary user can install packages from the Fedora repositories on the system, which is certainly better than having to know the root password to do it, but there is no way to install an RPM package in your own home directory and have it interoperate properly with system-installed packages. Fixed paths relative to the filesystem root are just too ingrained.

DNF 3: better performance and a move to C++

Posted Mar 30, 2018 6:40 UTC (Fri) by karkhaz (subscriber, #99844) [Link] (2 responses)

This is something language-specific package managers have done really well compared to distribution ones, IMO. `pip install --user foo` has exactly the same effect for you as `sudo pip install foo`, but nobody else sees any difference. But with distro packages, there's no option to do this; if you don't have root, then you typically have to get the source and build the program yourself.

Slightly tangential, but I always thought it would have been good to have a replica of the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard in each user's home directory (or perhaps in a dotfile under the home directory), i.e. every user gets ~/.usr/bin, ~/.usr/lib, ~/.usr/var, etc. I have no idea why the XDG standard used weird names when there are already perfectly standard names; they put several things under ~/.local (bin, lib, share), but there's also the ~/.config directory which could perfectly well be called ~/.local/etc, and ~/.cache could be ~/.local/var/cache or something.

Having users' home directories be that uniform might make distro-supported user-installable packages a lot easier implementation-wise, too!

DNF 3: better performance and a move to C++

Posted Apr 1, 2018 17:38 UTC (Sun) by epa (subscriber, #39769) [Link]

The language-specific package manager does let you install a per-user copy, but AFAIK it doesn't have a straightforward way to promote a single-user installation to a system-wide one. I'd like to be prompted 'package foo-0.5.2 is now installed globally; remove your local foo-0.5.1?'.

DNF 3: better performance and a move to C++

Posted Apr 5, 2018 8:40 UTC (Thu) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

There is a distro that allows this: NixOS.