More dnf annoyance

[Michael Schwendt]

On Tue, 11 Aug 2015 12:50:02 +0200, Ralf Corsepius wrote:

> Last Sunday, I've had a case, where I resorted to
> rm -rf /var/cache/dnf
> because neither "dnf clean all" nor "dnf --refresh" seems to have worked.
> 
> No matter what I did dnf seems have refetched the same outdated mirror 
> presenting me the same updates.

Out of pure coincidence I'd say.

After a "dnf clean all", some files are left below /var/cache/dnf, but
take a look yourself. No repodata files are left, and nothing like the
previous mirror you've been assigned to.

> Barring the fact Fedora mirrors seem to be broken quite often, these 
> day, with dnf, the situation seems to have worsened. AFAICT, it doesn't 
> correctly validate metadata and/or seems to prefer to refetch 
> broken/outdated/dead mirrors.

Mirroring is a difficult problem. Mirror admins need to know exactly
what they are doing. Or else they offer the latest repodata without
having mirrored all packages. Yum has choked on that problem often.

Observing Yum and DNF printing lots of errors while trying to find
a usable mirror, casts a shadow on the Fedora products as a whole.

One may think that if mirror manager knows the checksums of the last
and previous repo metadata releases, it could assign the package tools
to a matching mirror that is up-to-date. But either that isn't done,
or it's broken. The user gets the impression that the mirrors are out
of sync way too often.