Swiftly freezes on toolchain installation on Fedora 43

[TheConnorJohnson]

Recently setup swiftly on Fedora 43 but ran into an issue when downloading the Swift 6.3 toolchain.

When running swiftly install 6.3 the toolchain begins installation. However, the process stalls when checking on the installed packages, example: yum list installed binutils. I am able to continue by typing ctrl+z to suspend the process in the terminal to continue.

I am still able to install the toolchain successfully, but had to type ctrl+z several times to continue the process. I believe this an issue with the YUM package manager.

It would be worth moving from YUM since it is now a deprecated project and switch to DNF5 for Red Hat based distros.

[cmcgee1024]

Thank you for raising this as it has exposed a few different issues.

First, it is noteworthy that Fedora 43 is not a supported platform for Swift and swiftly at the moment.

What's happening behind the scenes is that swiftly is checking if required packages are installed on the system using the yum list installed <xyz> command. It does this for each required package, which is around 13 for Fedora 39. You can see the complete list here.

It turns out that this command will potentially reach out to the network depending on the version of yum/dnf that you have installed in your Linux distribution. The behaviour varies depending on the distribution. Yum is deprecated in newer Linux distributions, but it is not in older ones like Amazon Linux 2. The newer ones maintain some compatibility using a symlink to dnf.

The fix for all of the dnf supporting distributions to make use of the dnf list --installed flag, that is focused on only the locally installed packages, and appears to avoid network requests in ad-hoc tests on Linux platforms supported by Swift. Amazon Linux 2 will continue to need to use the yum command, and make a note on the console that it is checking for installed packages since that process is network dependent, unfortunately.