Hawkey, a new Package Management API

Summary

Hawkey is a package management library built on top of libsolv.

Owner

• Name: Aleš Kozumplík

• Email: akozumpl@redhat.com

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora 18
• Last updated: 2012-04-03
• Percentage of completion: 5%

Detailed Description

hawkey is a library allowing clients to query and resolve dependnecies of RPM packages based on the current state of RPMDB and yum repositories. While a superset of the functionality itself is available in yum, the new API promises to bring unification, fewer restrictions on clients' implementation language (yum API is in Python) and eventually performance improvements.

At the same time Fedora 18 will get DNF, a yum fork delegating query operations and depsolving to the new API. In Fedora 18 this is going to be a preview, not yet fully capable of replacing yum.

Benefit to Fedora

• easier bindings to other languages than Python (by being done in C)
• concise, clear package management API
• better performance (through utilizing libsolv)

The consumers of the API can in the future include:

• dnf (the next generation yum)
• release engineering tools
• PackageKit
• graphicala package management tools
• Anaconda

Scope

Including libsolv in Fedora

This is a library for fast dependencies resolving created and maintained by SUSE. The rpms are in Fedora already, we will need to rebase the package as needed.

hawkey package

Including documentation for the API.

Providing DNF package

Only for the interested so far to try the new package management app and give us feedback.

How To Test

User Experience

Those interested in trying out DNF will use 'dnf install ...' etc instead of 'yum install ...'. yum will still work as expected.

Dependencies

Contingency Plan

None necessary, yum and it's API will still be available.

Documentation

• hawkey documentation is maintained in a github wiki

Release Notes

Comments and Discussion