Hallo, I came to this list via Google while trying to find some information after having a rather unpleasant experience recently: I was engaged in a last-minute professional email exchange trying to beat a critical deadline while on a flaky tethered wireless connection when something (I think it was packagekitd) started downloading megabytes of presumably package metadata, almost completely saturating the link. I desperately tried to kill it, but maybe systemd respawned it immediately, at least I couldn't figure out how to do it and I couldn't Google for help as I usually do as the link was - well - saturated. I was lucky the whole thing finished in time, but now I am trying to fix the issue for good. I found that it has been discussed in passing as a side topic under the subject heading "F21 downloads repository metadata in 3 places!" without really coming to a resolution, and I found bits and pieces of information that leave me somewhat confused. I believe that this is a critical issue that users should not fight for themselves, but where the distribution should assist and be considerate. Here are some specific points for comment and consideration: First, I am very sure that F20 did not do this, it must have happened quietly after I did a fedup update (which otherwise worked well). Second, I have some trouble understanding how the pieces of software fit together. I am a technical user and not afraid to dig into details if necessary, but this is more complicated than I expected it to be. There is yum, dnf, packagekitd (I saw it with top), and Gnome software potentially involved, but instructions I find on the web seem to be ambiguous who is responsible for automatic metadata downloads. Some instructions point me to open the Gnome software dconf settings, where there is a "download updates" option (how about metadata then - I find it unlikely that actual packages were downloaded because the complete download volume was in the several MB range). Also, there is a listing "compatible-projects" which contains Gnome, KDE, XFCE. But I am a happy cinnamon user. Does this apply to me? I am sure I can find all of this out given enough time, but I think that if I am finding this difficult, there will be many others who will be in a similar boat, and there should probably be some brainstorming at the distribution level on how to set/unset such actions, and also how to protect users from sudden unexpected behavior which can render the network practically unusable at random times. Last, in the mailing list thread mentioned earlier, I read the opinion that nowadays bandwidth is not as much an issue as it used to be. In my experience, also from observing how others use their devices, this is not the case: we are now using mobile networked devices in situations where a few years back we would not have dreamed being online, including on airplanes, in remote spots with flaky mobile reception, or at crowded conference venues where everybody is competing for bandwidth on few configured access points. And we are expecting that we can get work done this way. Thus, in my experience, the ability to control who is using bandwidth at any time is a crucial capability of an operating system and should be exposed to the user in a more explicit way than fiddling with dconf settings. Regards, Marcel -- devel mailing list devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/devel Fedora Code of Conduct: http://fedoraproject.org/code-of-conduct
