F21 downloads repository metadata in 3 places!

[Hedayat Vatankhah]

/*Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com>*/ wrote on Tue, 16 Dec 2014 
13:09:47 -0700:
> Fresh installation of Fedora 21 Workstation, accepting defaults, I
> then reboot and notice the following contents of /var/cache, filtering
> out things not relevant for this discussion (which also happen to not
> change between the three states).
>
> Starting point right after installation:
>
> [root at localhost cache]# du -sh *
> 16K dnf
> 85M PackageKit
> 4.0K yum
>
>
> Login, wait for ~ 1/2 hour:
>
> [root at localhost cache]# du -sh *
> 94M dnf
> 446M PackageKit
> 4.0K yum
>
> That's 455MB of silently downloaded data, by default. Upon doing a yum
> upgrade, but rejecting the actual upgrade:
>
> [root at localhost cache]# du -sh *
> 94M dnf
> 446M PackageKit
> 137M yum
>
> Ummm, that's a metric shit ton of data to download for a brand new OS.
> No doubt this is bigger by now for Fedora 20 since most every package
> will have been touched by an update, and likely is well over 1GB to
> silently download.
>
> I suggest the following short term change:
>
> 1. dnf should not be downloading its metadata in the blind by default;
> yum doesn't, why is dnf doing this? And there's the hourly refresh it
> does by default also. I like this behavior for me, but I think it's
> simply an inappropriate default considering various bandwidth
> limitations that still exist in the world.
>
> 2. PackageKit very aggressively starts downloading both metadata and
> updated packages upon first login. I think this should be delayed so
> the user has an opportunity to disable it; and then Software or
> Settings needs a UI so that it can be disabled. The UI could
> differentiate between automatic checks for updates (metadata) vs
> automatic package downloads; or even between application vs OS
> downloads.
>
> But backing this up, the OS needs to ask for permission before
> additionally downloading 50% to 100+% of the install media size. I
> don't really care if this permission is conveyed in the installer UI;
> or g-i-s or a notification; but the current behavior is really
> presumptuous.
>
Thank you for providing real data. I'm really happy that I've disabled 
both PK and DNF auto-downloading right after installation :)

Thinking a little more about the whole situation, I was thinking if 
there should be a general packaging policy: no packages should be 
permitted to generate 'considerable' or any network traffic if not 
explicitly requested by the user.

Regards,
Hedayat