DNF vs. PyPI vs. Python vs. RPM Package Manager Comparison Chart

PyPI is the official repository for Python software packages, hosting hundreds of thousands of projects that developers can publish and users can discover and install. It supports both source distributions (“sdists”) and pre-built binary “wheels”, allowing packages to include native extensions for different platforms. Projects on PyPI consist of multiple releases, each of which can include various files for different operating systems or Python versions. Metadata for each package includes things like version number, dependencies, licensing, classifiers, description (including rendering Markdown or reStructuredText), and other information that tools like pip use to resolve, download, and install the correct package. PyPI provides search and filtering based on package metadata, letting users find what they need via keywords, compatibility, or other package attributes.

The RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a powerful package management system capable of building computer software from the source into easily distributable packages; installing, updating, and uninstalling packaged software; querying detailed information about the packaged software, whether installed or not; and verifying the integrity of packaged software and resulting software installation. The package’s metadata is stored in the RPM header. The header is a binary data structure that stores single pieces of data in tags. Each tag has a pre-defined meaning and data type. These are not stored in the header itself but need to be known by the code reading the header. In the header, the tags are only referred to by their number. Each tag is either of a plain scalar type or is an array of one of these types. While not enforced by the type system the RPM code assumes that tags belonging together have the same number of entries.