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Comment by chenxiaolong | Hacker News Reader

I've done a ton of distro hopping over the years and always come back to Fedora for a few main reasons:

* They ship a ton of mingw-w64 libraries. It's super nice to not have to cross-compile a bunch of dependencies when I'm building something for Windows.

* They ship debuginfo packages for everything. This was one thing I really missed when I used Arch, where I'd have to rebuild packages with "options+=(debug)".

* "dnf shell" exists, which lets you do multiple operations in one transaction that would otherwise cause conflicts if done separately. I'm not aware of any other distro package manager that supports this.

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I've been using Fedora since Fedora Core 15 and never stumbled across dnf shell. What's an example of using it to avoid conflicts?

One thing I do (for better or worse): if I need to patch a system package for an extended period of time (like to use a fork), I rebuild the package with a different name and make it provide the original package. For example, one package I recently did this with is libarchive. I rebuilt it as libarchive-patched and in the RPM spec file, I specified:

    Provides: libarchive-%{version}-%{release}

The new package would be able to substitute the old one, but the only way to install it is with dnf shell. Since other things depend on libarchive, I couldn't do:

    dnf remove libarchive
    dnf install ./libarchive-patched-*.rpm

Instead, if I do:

    dnf shell
    remove libarchive
    install ./libarchive-patched-*.rpm
    run

then both the remove and install are done in the same transaction and dnf won't throw any dependency resolution errors.

This is awesome! Will definitely be using this, thanks!

> * They ship a ton of mingw-w64 libraries. It's super nice to not have to cross-compile a bunch of dependencies when I'm building something for Windows.

Still shipping, however they dropped EPEL7 support for it :( Issue about it here:

https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/2333

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