Zypper, the package manager for the openSUSE family of Linux distros, is finally gaining parallel downloads, although not in the traditional manner.

Each family of Linux distros has their own package manager, with Debian/Ubuntu using apt, Fedora and Red Hat using dnf, and Arch using pacman. openSUSE’s package manager is zypper, an otherwise capable option. Many openSUSE users, in particular, appreciate zypper’s verbose explanations and the fact that it gives the user choices about how to resolve conflict, etc.

One thing zypper is also known for, however, is its speed—or lack thereof. Much of this is the result of zypper not supporting parallel downloads, unlike virtually every other package manager. It seems the openSUSE team is finally addressing this with a new tool called sypper.

The team describe’s sypper’s use in a blog post:

As part of benchmarking and prototyping for mirror infrastructure, a new tool was developed, sypper. While its intended purpose is a little bit different, it can be used for pre-downloading packages for zypper. Benchmarking shows that it downloads 4-5 times faster by using concurrent downloads and skipping some advanced checks, which zypper does. So check the readme if you want to experiment with the download speed.

As the readme points out, there are two ways to run sypper:

• Run sypper as a regular user: It will create a directory cache/packages in the current directory. You can copy the content of that folder to /var/cache/zypp/packages, so zypper will pick them up instead of downloading.
• Run sypper as root, then it will download packages to /var/cache/zypp/packages, so zypper will pick them up on the next run. It should be noted that the developers do not recommend this option.

Although there has been not statement to this effect, hopefully sypper’s functionality will eventually be folded into zypper, giving the package manager true native parallel downloads. If that happens, zypper could easily become the best package manager on any distro.