(replying to several)
Sometime after saying that what Ed suggested and that it worked. I discovered that it was overkill. I launched "apper", and it failed because "PackageKit" was not running. Having read the postings since my Dec. 18 message...
(Tom said)
But as I discovered, if you disable that, and simply run
dnf update
it will never think there are any updates available. ...
Having seen that, to do the weekly patches this morning, I first did systemctl unmask packagekit.service and then (after rebooting) proceeded to do dnf upgrade --refresh There were problems with python2 and hplip. But I assumed those problems were not related to PackageKit. (Let's leave those 2 problems aside for now; I'll get to those later. I am aware of the hplip thread.) Apart from those 2 problems, the patch worked. Apper and software also now appear to work, and I'm not getting any requests for permission to update.
Let me approach this as a good software engineer should: *requirements* first! Here are my requirements for my workstation: The only times there should be any checking for updates is: * when I manually enter certain dnf commands. In this case, the checking should be a part of the dnf command's execution. So my weekly patches should only require "dnf upgrade --refresh", and that entered only once. * when rkhunter runs (I think it automatically checks for updates to its database).
I don't know how to determine if any other checking is going on. Do I already have what I want, or do I need to do one or more of what was suggested by a few of you: (Samuel) But there is also a cron job for dnf that updates the metadata regularly (daily?). If that's a concern for you, you can disable that one as well. (Ed) By "cron job" don't you mean dnf-makecache.timer in systemd? (Samuel) systemctl disable dnf-makecache.timer (Joe) systemctl stop dnf-makecache.timer (Samuel) Or run "systemctl disable --now dnf-makecache.timer" to do both at once.