Description of problem:

SUSE received a community feature request to consider using DNF for openSUSE Leap Next, therefore SLE Next as well (Future Leap is planned to be based on SLE binaries).

Update on the feature request will be part of Release Engineering meeting minutes (weekly on Wednesdays).
https://etherpad.opensuse.org/p/ReleaseEngineering-20200722
About SLE community feature requests: https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Leap/SLEFeatureRequests

Response from SLE Architect:
The current dnf implementation cannot be used as zypper replacement. The installed footprint is too "fat". A full blown zypper stack adds 56MB to the system, the minimal dnf stack (without dnf-plugins-core) adds 112MB to the system and requires Python. With Python's less than ideal compatibility guarantees (compatibility is only assured at X.Y.* level, and X.* versions are not compatible at the filesystem level, necessitating rebuilds and transitions), we want to avoid Python in the minimal core base OS used to construct our platforms (MicroOS, Kubic, etc.).

Because of that large footprint, we would still need something smaller for base containers, embedded systems, Edge, Container Host OS and similar products. With the current state of things, that would necessitate maintaining two package manager stacks, which is not desirable.

But we should work together with the DNF team to make DNF 5 a good candidate by solving our problems, especially the massive Python dependencies. Having one tool with a big community would make many things much easier.

The RFE:

The current zypper installation footprint is 56 MB on top of a minimal core.

I'm not sure if this is achievable with python, but the dnf installation footprint needs to be comparable with zypper. Standard functionality like installing, updating or de-installing RPMs should be possible without the need for python.