14 DAY TRIAL // Kevin Fenzi posted a new message on the Fedora devel-announce mailing list a couple of days ago, informing all users and developers about a new proposal for the upcoming Fedora 23 Linux operating system, called DNF System Upgrades.
The new proposal promises to add support for sending progress output to the Plymouth boot splash in the DNF package manager, to modify the specifications of systemd's Offline System Updates facility to support distribution upgrades, to integrate or add support for Offline System Updates in DNF, to add a plugin to DNF or dnf-plugins-core, to provide all the necessary documentation, and to ultimately obsolete and retire the FedUp utility.
"While fedup worked well in many circumstances, there were a lot of problems resulting from using upgrade.img. This has caused nasty, hard-to-debug blocker bugs for every release since it was introduced," says Kevin Fenzi. "It turns out that upgrade.img was relying on some undocumented, unsupported systemd behavior. [...] Therefore, we propose that system upgrades should be handled by the system packaging tools, using systemd's Offline System Updates facility."
Fedora's FedUp utility is about to die
Exactly two months ago, we reported news that the Fedora Project developers had plans for redesigning the FedUp utility, which was used for recent Fedora Linux versions on major system upgrades, for the upcoming Fedora 23 release. However, according to the new proposal, it appears that the Fedup is no longer needed and that the brand-new DNF package manager should handle everything update/upgrade related.
Apparently, the FedUp utility will no longer be supported by the systemd init system and service manager, which already offers a more reliable and simpler method for performing Offline System Updates on a Fedora Linux distribution. That method can also be used to perform Fedora system upgrades in the next versions of the distribution.