View Changelogs with the DNF Package Manager

As an extension of my past post on YUM Changelog, this post covers the DNF package manager.

Dandified Yum (DNF) has been in use by the Fedora Project for 5 releases so far (since F18 and F23 is the current stable release).

DNF brings with it changes including replacements or (at the present time) omissions of features and plugins that were applicable to YUM. A quick peek at the DNF command reference shows that much of the syntax is familiar to that of YUM.

At this time, the changelog feature equivalent to YUM's yum-plugin-changelog has not been ported yet. Fortunately there is a DNF command that provides similar information.

DNF's updateinfo command can be used to display information from update advisories.

View changelog information for all packages with pending updates:

dnf updateinfo summary | less
dnf updateinfo list | less
dnf updateinfo info | less

View changelog information for a single package (in this case the kernel) with pending updates:

dnf updateinfo summary kernel
dnf updateinfo list kernel
dnf updateinfo info kernel
dnf updateinfo info kernel | less
dnf updateinfo info -v kernel | less

NOTE:

Once all the pending updates have been applied, the above commands no longer return output. After installation, RPM's changelog command can be used to query changelog information for packages (as normally is the case).

rpm -q --changelog kernel-4.4.6-301.fc23.x86_64 | less

Since Fedora and the Fedora Project are an upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases (and CentOS given its relationship), a future release will eventually include DNF.

Fortunately being a fork of YUM, DNF does retain much of the YUM syntax RHEL/CentOS sysadmins are accustomed to so adjustment should be straightforward.

I hope this brief article serves you well in checking the changelogs and maintaining your Fedora systems as well as future RHEL/CentOS releases that ship with DNF!

The magnificent headline image of a log carved in the shape of a penguin was sourced from [0].