dnf5 compatibility tracking issue

[jelly]

There is a Fedora 41 proposal to switch to dnf5 this impacts PackageKit and dnf-automatic. See this proposal.

Impact:

• dnf-automatic becomes a plugin
• cli changes

• confirm with dnf team how to configure the plugin: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2279258

[AdamWill]

Note, the update now exists in Bodhi for testing - https://bodhi.fedoraproject.org/updates/FEDORA-2024-8a41ea93a2 . The openQA tests show that cockpit still pulls in the dnf4 dnf-automatic rather than the dnf5 dnf-plugin-automatic.

[martinpitt]

I did an initial manual test for this. On our rawhide image:

dnf remove -y dnf-automatic
dnf5 install -y dnf5-plugin-automatic

This became structurally easier, there is now just one dnf5-automatic.timer (plus dnf-automatic.timer alias), no -*install variant any more. However, now I'm a bit lost -- https://dnf5.readthedocs.io/en/latest/changes.html says "Different configuration file locations and some changes in format", but the manpage still talks about /etc/dnf/automatic.conf. However, dnf5-plugin-automatic does not ship any config file, nor does any other package (find /etc/dnf/ -name '*auto*'), and the dnf-automatic-notifyonly.timer reference and "Some other timer units are provided" are clearly obsolete.

When I simulate a timer event with systemctl start dnf5-automatic, it merely download available updates (according to the journal). When I create a config according to the manpage:

# cat /etc/dnf/automatic.conf
[commands]
apply_updates = True

it still only uploads, so it doesn't really look at that file.

$ strace -e trace=file /usr/bin/dnf5 automatic
[...]
newfstatat(AT_FDCWD, "/etc/dnf/dnf5-plugins/automatic.conf", 0x7ffee3c912d0, 0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
newfstatat(AT_FDCWD, "/usr/share/dnf5/dnf5-plugins/automatic.conf", 0x7ffee3c912d0, 0) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)

Aha! I moved the file to that place. When I run dnf5 automatic now, it installs packages.

I also tried to add "reboot = when-needed". My currently available updates include the kernel, and it correctly schedules a reboot after updates.

I filed https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2279257 about the outdated manpage, and https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2279258 about the missing config file. In the latter I also asked how exactly Cockpit is supposed to enable auto-upgrades with dnf5. I'll let the dnf team respond to that first before changing our code.