Repeat post

[Kalev Lember]

On 08/08/2015 10:18 PM, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> On Sat, 2015-08-08 at 17:54 +0930, Andrew Walton wrote:
>> Quite a few people have told me that packagekit doesn't do it's own 
>> downloads but here's a quick experiment you can try that says this is 
>> not entirely accurate.
> 
> Of course it does its own downloads! And even if it didn't, it would
> still be harsh on bandwidth: simply checking for updates requires
> downloading new repo metadata, which can be big on its own.

To clear this up, the above is both true and untrue in a way :)

It's gnome-software that drives the periodic downloads, but the actual
downloading is done through PackageKit.

The daily metadata downloading can be currently turned off with a
super-secret gsettings key. It was originally only meant for the live cd
use case where we needed to turn off metadata downloads in order to
avoid filling up the ramdisk, but I have heard that people have found
this useful for other cases as well.

Periodic metadata downloads can be disabled with:
gsettings set org.gnome.software download-updates false

and reset to the default value (re-enabled) with:
gsettings reset org.gnome.software download-updates

Furthermore, there's a new NetworkManager API in the works that allows
apps to determine if connections are 'metered' to avoid downloading
updates. This API actually landed in NetworkManager a few weeks ago, and
there's a plan to make use of it in gnome-software.

Look out for improvements in this area :)


Hope this clears things up,
Kalev