Fedora DNF¶

Fedora’s RPM package manager.

mpm reads the inventory through repoquery rather than the human-facing listing: --userinstalled for packages installed on request (dependencies pulled in automatically are skipped) and --upgrades for pending updates, both with a --queryformat that joins the fields on a private ___MPM___ delimiter so summaries containing spaces stay splittable. Every call is forced --color=never and --quiet for parseable output.

Note

remove runs autoremove, so removing a package also drops the dependencies it leaves orphaned. search matches names only, with no exact or extended mode.

The DNF5 and YUM subclasses reuse everything here, differing only in the binary and forced arguments.

Documentation:

https://dnf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/command_ref.html
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Rosetta (command equivalences)

Home page: https://github.com/rpm-software-management/dnf
Source: meta_package_manager/managers/dnf.py
Version requirement: >=4.0.0

Platforms¶

🅱️ BSD
🐧 Linux
⨂ Unix

Operations¶

Operation	Supported	Notes
`installed`	✓
`outdated`	✓
`search`	✓	exact and extended search backfilled by `mpm`
`install`	✓
`upgrade`	✓
`upgrade_all`	✓
`remove`	✓
`sync`	✓
`cleanup`	✓

Ecosystem¶

Accepted purl types: pkg:dnf, pkg:rpm

Usage¶

$ mpm --dnf installed
$ mpm --dnf search "query"
$ mpm --dnf upgrade --all
$ mpm install pkg:dnf/hello
$ mpm --dry-run --dnf upgrade --all

Every example above accepts --dry-run, which simulates the underlying manager calls without touching the system: the safe way to watch what mpm would do before trusting it.

Deselect the manager for a single run with --no-dnf, disable it from your configuration, or tune its invocation attributes with per-manager overrides.

Command line¶

CLI names, in lookup order: dnf, dnf4
Arguments forced before each call: --color=never --quiet

The version is extracted from the output of dnf --version with:

r"(?P<version>\S+)"

Privilege escalation¶

System-wide manager: mpm wraps its privileged operations in sudo out of the box. Instead of letting the tool prompt mid-run, mpm primes the credential cache up-front, with a single branded password prompt at most. Turn escalation off for rootless setups with --no-sudo or the per-manager sudo override.

See privilege escalation for the full policy.

Cooldown¶

State of Fedora DNF’s release-age gating, from the cooldown support table:

Status: ❌ None (effort focused on dnf5)

With --cooldown set, mpm skips this manager’s install and upgrade operations rather than run them unguarded (fail-closed); --allow-unsupported-managers opts back in.

Reference traces¶

Raw native outputs captured in the manager source: the reference mpm’s parsers were written against. If you know Fedora DNF well and a transcript below looks wrong, or a newer release changed its output format, report it.

$ dnf repoquery --userinstalled --qf FORMAT
acl___MPM___2.2.53-1.el8___MPM___Access control list utilities___MPM___x86_64
audit___MPM___3.0.7-4.el9___MPM___User space auditing tools___MPM___x86_64
audit-libs___MPM___3.0.7-4.el9___MPM___Dynamic auditing library___MPM___x86_64

$ dnf repoquery --upgrades --qf FORMAT
acl___MPM___2.2.53-1.el8___MPM___2.6.53-1.el8___MPM___Access control list utilities___MPM___x86_64
audit___MPM___2.2.53-1.el8___MPM___2.5.53-1.el8___MPM___User space auditing tools___MPM___x86_64
audit-libs___MPM___2.2.53-1.el8___MPM___2.6.53-1.el8___MPM___Dynamic auditing library___MPM___x86_64