Plasma-discover-packagekit still uses dnf4/3?

Ask Fedora
1

I was running Discover in KDE on Fedora 42 that’s otherwise fully updated. Some OS upgrades showed in Discover via the plasma-discover-packagekit backend. They were mostly a bunch of rpms for LibreOffice upgrades. So I ran the upgrades and it did the usual upgrade and reboot cycle that PackageKit wants (I usually upgrade via command line dnf5 and decide myself if reboot is necessary).

After the upgrade I checked

dnf5 history list last

and the Discover upgrade just done was not there. It was only showing up back in the old “dnf4/3” history

dnf-3 history list last

and that showed the Discover package upgrade I just did. So I’m surprised that the PackageKit backend for Discover is still back on dnf3 and it’s July of 2025. So when will Discover be hooked into dnf5 instead of 3? The reason I find this important is that dnf3 and dnf5 use distinct and inconsistent databases hence the difference in the two “history lists”. I only want a single place dealing with my packages (namely ‘dnf5’ and any gui to use dnf5)

2

Surprise, surprise!

Packagekit has not been updated to the newest dnf5 protocols.
It uses dnf4 across all the spins where it is functional.

Gnome, KDE, and others.

It has only been a year since dnf5 was included in fedora and it takes time for other tools to adjust to the changes.

Dnf-3 has been a link to dnf4 for many years. You can see what is linked where with ls -l /usr/bin/dnf*

For now, if you want consistency in the databases you should choose to use ONLY dnf5 on the cli, or ONLY the gui. Right now they are not consistent.

Some things must be done on the cli with dnf (dnf5) or dnf4. Most can be done using the gui.

3

FYI gnome-software has a dnf5 version in rawhide that I expect to ship in f43.
But I have not seen news on dnf5 for discover.

4

So probably Fedora 44 for Discover to use dnf5. I looked in the Fedora 43 changeset:

and didn’t see any mention of Discover changes regarding this for 43

5

dnf-3 is named “-3” because it was using Python3 where dnf-2 was using python2.

6

Yes, I knew about that and it’s not related to the topic. I’m just asking when can Discover’s packagekit backend be expected to use dnf5 instead of dnf-3/dnf4. Until then I will avoid using it and just use command line dnf5

7

I was not able to find out what the plan is, I’m also curious about it’s support for dnf5.

Maybe you could ask the KDE people on there forum? Which is https://discuss.kde.org