On Mon, Apr 6, 2020 at 8:08 PM Adam Williamson adamwill@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Mon, 2020-04-06 at 23:56 +0000, Tom Seewald wrote:
Yep, I just ran "dnf info kernel" and then right after that "dnf changelog kernel", in both cases dnf spent over 20 seconds syncing. I haven't seen other package managers require this much network traffic, and I wonder if a lot of it could be avoided.
If you only want to query *locally installed* packages, you can just use rpm:
rpm -qi kernel rpm -q --changelog kernel
if you use DNF, it will get the info for packages that are in the repositories but not locally installed, as well. changelogs are kept and retrieved separately, I believe, as they aren't needed for any other operations, so that's why you see remote trips on both commands, I think.
With the exception of changelogs (which requires downloading other.xml metadata), all query actions should be possible to perform with DNF with --cacheonly flag, which will use the system cache or local user cache if it hasn't expired yet.
I have heard from people that the cache is expiring prematurely in some cases (thus forcing more metadata downloads), but I haven't been able to reproduce it myself.