Talk: On upgrade to Fedora 41, some dnf plugins may be missing

[kparal (Kamil Páral)]

This is a discussion topic for the following Common Issue:

On upgrade to Fedora 41, some dnf plugins may be missing

Problem In the transition from DNF 4 to DNF 5 as part of Fedora 41, most plugins have been reimplemented and moved around. Currently, the package metadata is not optimally set to do the best job of ensuring as many plugins as possible that you had installed before upgrading are still installed after the upgrade. Cause Many plugins initially weren’t reimplemented at all, and have been added only gradually over time. We did not yet systematically map out what metadata needs to be set in the packa…

You can discuss the problem and its solutions here, but please note that debugging and technical feedback should primarily go to the issue trackers (e.g. Bugzilla) linked in the Common Issue, because that’s the place that developers watch, not here.

If there are any updates/changes/amendments for the Common Issue description, which you believe should be performed, please post it here.

[kparal (Kamil Páral)]

Please see the Common Issue for solution/workarounds:

On upgrade to Fedora 41, some dnf plugins may be missing

Problem In the transition from DNF 4 to DNF 5 as part of Fedora 41, most plugins have been reimplemented and moved around. Currently, the package metadata is not optimally set to do the best job of ensuring as many plugins as possible that you had installed before upgrading are still installed after the upgrade. Cause Many plugins initially weren’t reimplemented at all, and have been added only gradually over time. We did not yet systematically map out what metadata needs to be set in the packa…

[mjg (Michael J Gruber)]

Does this (and the general experience) depend on how you upgrade? In particular, since dnf4 and dnf5 share only part of their information, does it make a difference which dnf is used to do an in-place upgrade to F41 (beta)? This may or may not affect which packages autoremove and the like (dnf5 after the upgrade) consider user-installed.

[kparal (Kamil Páral)]

That’s a good question and I don’t know the answer (and I haven’t tested it). I’d expect that dnf4 and gnome-software/discover should yield the same result. Not sure about dnf5 (F40->F41). Perhaps @egoode can answer that.

[egoode (Evan Goode)]

The issue here is that dnf5-plugins is not automatically installed when dnf5 is installed.

I am in the process of releasing DNF 5.2.6.1 which has a conditional Recommends of dnf5-plugins if dnf-plugins-core is already installed. We’ll be able to get DNF 5.2.6.1 into F41 so that the F40 → F41 upgrade will automatically install the DNF 5 plugins if the user had already installed dnf-plugins-core (which would theoretically be all users, since the system-upgrade command needed to upgrade to F41 is a DNF 4 plugin). So this issue should be resolved before F41 is generally available.

does it make a difference which dnf is used to do an in-place upgrade to F41 (beta)?

It shouldn’t make a difference for this particular issue, but generally speaking, I recommend using DNF 4 to upgrade to F41. The version of DNF 5 in F40 repos is rather old and has a bug that prevents DNF 4 → DNF 5 history import from working correctly. Plus, the vast majority of users will be using DNF 4 to upgrade; the recommended upgrade path will be the same for F41 as in previous versions.