What does HackerNews think of libsolv?
Library for solving packages and reading repositories
I'm not 100% sure if this is current, but APT uses (or used) a heuristics search, but it is possible to configure it to use an external solver instead. See https://salsa.debian.org/apt-team/apt/-/blob/main/doc/extern...
Can anyone explain why there needs to be a new solver just for pip instead of adding support for python packages to something like libsolv[0].
I get the impression that people using Debian and their derivatives seem to live under a rock regarding other distributions.
I would trust zypper dup hundred times over apt-get dist-upgrade. This gets amplified by the fact that openSUSE Tumbleweed (rolling distro), is much better auto-tested before being published every week, than my experience with sid was (tested by their end-users).
Today's Redhat dnf package manager is based on SUSE's dependency solver (https://github.com/openSUSE/libsolv), and both package managers provide a very nice user experience.
People seem to be still confused about SUSE "using YaST". YaST is just a front-end powered by libzypp (https://github.com/openSUSE/libzypp), like zypper is.
It was not mentioned in the post that dnf is based on the openSUSE dependency SAT solver (libsolv) that was created by Michael Schroeder years ago and that powers libzypp and zypper since openSUSE 11.0.
The dnf developers built a thin layer on top of it, called hawkey, and then build dnf in python on top of hawkey.
One of the biggest innovations of libsolv is not only the SAT based solver but also the .solv format which allows to store package metadata for big amounts of packages in an efficient way and operate the solver directly on it.