From: "Michael Schwendt" <mschwendt(a)gmail.com>
Since you can point the program at local packages as well as things to
fetch from remote repositories, it would be cool, if the tool were smart
enough to do the right thing, regardless of whether you run "dnf update …"
or "dnf install …".
The former failing to handle local packages whereas the latter would
happily update already installed packages, would be very confusing.
Compared with that, "rpm -Uvh …" installs what's not installed yet.
And "rpm -Fvh …" is the special case where you only want to apply
updates, but not install any new package.
The user explicitly asks the tool to do something, so why would the
tool refuse to serve the user unless it detects any problem?
I think we are on the same page.
"rpm -Uvh …" ~ "dnf install" - only difference is that dnf install
can
do downgrades too if you specify the version of the package
"rpm -Fvh" ~ "dnf update" - only difference is that dnf update gives
you
the message that package is not installed. (I don't know whether rpm skips
not-installed packages and proceeds with the rest of arguments though)
The commands should work the same for local files and remote packages.
If update does not work like that then it's a bug in DNF and will be fixed.
Personally I find "install"/"update" naming more readable than
"-Uvh"/"-Fvh".
Honza