DNF: why does it refresh metadata all the time

Jared K. Smith jsmith at fedoraproject.org
Thu Jun 19 18:59:52 UTC 2014


On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 2:01 PM, Reindl Harald <h.reindl at thelounge.net>
wrote:

> if *that* is what is supposed to make DNF faster it's just a lie
>

This is not the only thing that DNF does differently to try to make package
installations and updates go faster (or appear to go faster).  Calling the
developers liers doesn't help the situation any.


> if i am really interested in updates now i do "yum clean metadata && yum
> upgrade"
> for many years simply because you don't know how accurat you metadata are
>

Sure, but you have to understand -- you're a power user.  You know enough
to do this in yum for your particular use case, which means you probably
know enough to change the DNF settings with regards to cron-based metadata
retrieval.  What I think you're missing (and frankly, seem to miss in the
lot of fedora-devel discussions you take part in) is that Fedora isn't
engineered around *your* particular needs.  We do things mostly by
consensus, and aim to make it a pleasant experience for the *average* user
(or whatever we have in the Fedora community that approximates an average
user), and not just for power users with very specific needs and
requirements.

Whether you like it or not, one of the most common complaints about yum
(especially from people coming from another package management system) is
that it seems slow because of the necessity to download the metadata.  The
DNF developers -- in trying to address this common complaint -- had solved
it by handling metadata in a different way.  They've also added settings so
that power users like you and I can tune it to better fit our particular
needs.


>
> and *no* traffic is not cheap everywhere, by far not
>

I probably understand this better than a lot of people on this list, as
I've been on a bandwidth-limited connection for the past nine years.  Only
in the past month have I been able to get high speed internet in my home
that wasn't limited to a few gigabytes per month.  So yes, I completely
understand that traffic isn't cheap (or fast) everywhere.

--
Jared Smith
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