DOKK / manpages / debian 11 / dnf / yum2dnf.8.en
YUM2DNF(8) DNF YUM2DNF(8)

yum2dnf - Changes in DNF compared to YUM

For install command:

The --skip-broken option is an alias for --setopt=strict=0. Both options could be used with DNF to skip all unavailable packages or packages with broken dependencies given to DNF without raising an error causing the whole operation to fail. This behavior can be set as default in dnf.conf file. See strict conf option.

For upgrade command:

The semantics that were supposed to trigger in YUM with --skip-broken are now set for plain dnf update as a default. There is no need to use --skip-broken with the dnf upgrade command. To use only the latest versions of packages in transactions, there is the --best command line switch.

Invoking dnf update or dnf upgrade, in all their forms, has the same effect in DNF, with the latter being preferred. In YUM yum upgrade was exactly like yum --obsoletes update.

The clean_requirements_on_remove switch is on by default in DNF. It can thus be confusing to compare the "remove" operation results between DNF and YUM as by default DNF is often going to remove more packages.

The YUM version of this command is maintained for legacy reasons only. The user can just use dnf provides to find out what package provides a particular file.

An alternative to the YUM deplist command to find out dependencies of a package is dnf repoquery --deplist using repoquery command.

NOTE:

Alternatively there is a YUM compatibility support where yum deplist is alias for dnf repoquery --deplist command


YUM only respects excludes during installs and upgrades. DNF extends this to all operations, among others erasing and listing. If you e.g. want to see a list of all installed python-f* packages but not any of the Flask packages, the following will work:

dnf -x '*flask*' list installed 'python-f*'


Inclusion of other configuration files in the main configuration file is no longer supported.

After UsrMove there's no directory /bin on Fedora systems and no files get installed there, /bin is only a symlink created by the filesystem package to point to /usr/bin. Resolving the symlinks to their real path would only give the user a false sense that this works, while in fact provides requests using globs such as:

dnf provides /b*/<file>


will fail still (as they do in YUM now). To find what provides a particular binary, use the actual path for binaries on Fedora:

dnf provides /usr/bin/<file>


Also see related Fedora bugzillas 982947 and 982664.

In some distributions DNF is shipped with skip_if_unavailable=True in the DNF configuration file. The reason for the change is that third-party repositories can often be unavailable. Without this setting in the relevant repository configuration file YUM immediately stops on a repository synchronization error, confusing and bothering the user.

See the related Fedora bug 984483.

This config option has been dropped. When DNF sees several groups with the same group ID it merges the groups' contents together.

To simplify things for the user, DNF uses metadata_expire for both expiring metadata and the mirrorlist file (which is a kind of metadata itself).

The following part of yum.conf(5) no longer applies for the mirrorlist option:

As a special hack if the mirrorlist URL contains the word "metalink" then the value of mirrorlist is copied to metalink (if metalink is not set).


The relevant repository configuration files have been fixed to respect this, see the related Fedora bug 948788.

Unsupported to simplify the configuration.

Dropping this config option with blurry semantics simplifies the configuration. DNF behaves as if this was disabled. If the user wanted to upgrade everything to the latest version she'd simply use dnf upgrade.

Since DNF tolerates the use of other package managers, it is possible that not all changes to the RPMDB are stored in the history of transactions. Therefore, DNF does not fail if such a situation is encountered and thus the force option is not needed anymore.

Time after time one needs to remove an installed package and replace it with a different one, providing the same capabilities while other packages depending on these capabilities stay installed. Without (transiently) breaking consistency of the package database this can be done by performing the remove and the install in one transaction. The common way to set up such a transaction in DNF is to use dnf shell or use the --allowerasing switch.

E.g. say you want to replace A (providing P) with B (also providing P, conflicting with A) without deleting C (which requires P) in the process. Use:

dnf --allowerasing install B


This command is equal to yum swap A B.

DNF provides swap command but only dnf swap A B syntax is supported

During its depsolving phase, YUM outputs lines similar to:

---> Package rubygem-rhc.noarch 0:1.16.9-1.fc19 will be an update
--> Processing Dependency: rubygem-net-ssh-multi >= 1.2.0 for package: rubygem-rhc-1.16.9-1.fc19.noarch


DNF does not output information like this. The technical reason is that depsolver below DNF always considers all dependencies for update candidates and the output would be very long. Secondly, even in YUM this output gets confusing very quickly especially for large transactions and so does more harm than good.

See the related Fedora bug 1044999.

When one executes:

yum provides sandbox


YUM applies extra heuristics to determine what the user meant by sandbox, for instance it sequentially prepends entries from the PATH environment variable to it to see if it matches a file provided by some package. This is an undocumented behavior that DNF does not emulate. Just typically use:

dnf provides /usr/bin/sandbox


or even:

dnf provides '*/sandbox'


to obtain similar results.

DNF supports the throttle and bandwidth options familiar from YUM. Contrary to YUM, when multiple downloads run simultaneously the total downloading speed is throttled. This was not possible in YUM since downloaders ran in different processes.

Compared to YUM, DNF appends list values from the installonlypkgs config option to DNF defaults, where YUM overwrites the defaults by option values.

The boolean deltarpm option controls whether delta RPM files are used. Compared to YUM, DNF does not support deltarpm_percentage and instead chooses some optimal value of DRPM/RPM ratio to decide whether using deltarpm makes sense in the given case.

DNF will terminate early with an error if a command is executed requesting an installing operation on a local .srpm file:

$ dnf install fdn-0.4.17-1.fc20.src.rpm tour-4-6.noarch.rpm
Error: Will not install a source rpm package (fdn-0.4.17-1.fc20.src).


The same applies for package specifications that do not match any available package.

YUM will only issue a warning in this case and continue installing the "tour" package. The rationale behind the result in DNF is that a program should terminate with an error if it can not fulfill the CLI command in its entirety.

DNF will not magically replace a request for installing package X to installing package Y if Y obsoletes X. YUM does this if its obsoletes config option is enabled but the behavior is not properly documented and can be harmful.

See the related Fedora bug 1096506 and guidelines for renaming and obsoleting packages in Fedora.

DNF offers more predictable behavior of installroot. DNF handles the path differently from the --config command-line option, where this path is always related to the host system (YUM combines this path with installroot). Reposdir is also handled slightly differently, if one path of the reposdirs exists inside of installroot, then repos are strictly taken from installroot (YUM tests each path from reposdir separately and use installroot path if existed). See the detailed description for --installroot option.

DNF doesn't provide download functionality after displaying transaction table. It only asks user whether to continue with transaction or not. If one wants to download packages, they can use the 'download' command.

DNF lists all packages from all repos, which means there can be duplicates package names (with different repo name). This is due to providing users possibility to choose preferred repo.

Translations became part of core DNF and it is no longer necessary to manage individual language packs.

Following sub-commands were removed:

  • langavailable
  • langinstall
  • langremove
  • langlist
  • langinfo

Original YUM tool DNF command/option Package
yum check dnf repoquery --unsatisfied dnf
yum-langpacks dnf
yum-plugin-aliases dnf alias dnf
yum-plugin-auto-update-debug-info option in debuginfo-install.conf dnf-plugins-core
yum-plugin-changelog dnf-plugins-core
yum-plugin-copr dnf copr dnf-plugins-core
yum-plugin-fastestmirror fastestmirror option in dnf.conf dnf
yum-plugin-fs-snapshot dnf-plugins-extras-snapper
yum-plugin-local dnf-plugins-core
yum-plugin-merge-conf dnf-plugins-extras-rpmconf
yum-plugin-post-transaction-actions dnf-plugins-core
yum-plugin-priorities priority option in dnf.conf dnf
yum-plugin-remove-with-leaves dnf autoremove dnf
yum-plugin-show-leaves dnf-plugins-core
yum-plugin-tmprepo --repofrompath option dnf
yum-plugin-tsflags tsflags option in dnf.conf dnf
yum-plugin-versionlock python3-dnf-plugin-versionlock
yum-rhn-plugin dnf-plugin-spacewalk

Plugins that have not been ported yet:

yum-plugin-filter-data, yum-plugin-keys, yum-plugin-list-data, yum-plugin-protectbase, yum-plugin-ps, yum-plugin-puppetverify, yum-plugin-refresh-updatesd, yum-plugin-rpm-warm-cache, yum-plugin-upgrade-helper, yum-plugin-verify

Feel free to file an RFE for missing functionality if you need it.

All ported YUM tools are now implemented as DNF plugins.

Original YUM tool New DNF command Package
debuginfo-install dnf debuginfo-install dnf-plugins-core
find-repos-of-install dnf list installed dnf
needs-restarting dnf tracer dnf-plugins-extras-tracer
package-cleanup dnf list, dnf repoquery dnf, dnf-plugins-core
repoclosure dnf repoclosure dnf-plugins-extras-repoclosure
repodiff dnf repodiff dnf-plugins-core
repo-graph dnf repograph dnf-plugins-extras-repograph
repomanage dnf repomanage dnf-plugins-extras-repomanage
repoquery dnf repoquery dnf
reposync dnf reposync dnf-plugins-core
repotrack dnf download --resolve --alldeps dnf-plugins-core
yum-builddep dnf builddep dnf-plugins-core
yum-config-manager dnf config-manager dnf-plugins-core
yum-debug-dump dnf debug-dump dnf-plugins-extras-debug
yum-debug-restore dnf debug-restore dnf-plugins-extras-debug
yumdownloader dnf download dnf-plugins-core

Detailed table for package-cleanup replacement:

package-cleanup --dupes dnf repoquery --duplicates
package-cleanup --leaves dnf repoquery --unneeded
package-cleanup --orphans dnf repoquery --extras
package-cleanup --problems dnf repoquery --unsatisfied
package-cleanup --cleandupes dnf remove --duplicates
package-cleanup --oldkernels dnf remove --oldinstallonly
package-cleanup --oldkernels --keep=2 dnf remove $(dnf repoquery --installonly --latest-limit=-2)

DNF does not have a direct replacement of yum-updateonboot and yum-cron commands. However, the similar result can be achieved by dnf automatic command (see automatic).

You can either use the shortcut:

$ systemctl enable --now dnf-automatic-install.timer


Or set apply_updates option of /etc/dnf/automatic.conf to True and use generic timer unit:

$ systemctl enable --now dnf-automatic.timer


The timer in both cases is activated 1 hour after the system was booted up and then repetitively once every 24 hours. There is also a random delay on these timers set to 5 minutes. These values can be tweaked via dnf-automatic*.timer config files located in the /usr/lib/systemd/system/ directory.

repo-rss, show-changed-rco, show-installed, verifytree, yum-groups-manager

Take a look at the FAQ about YUM to DNF migration. Feel free to file an RFE for missing functionality if you need it.

See AUTHORS in DNF source distribution.

2012-2021, Red Hat, Licensed under GPLv2+

March 1, 2021 4.5.2