Hi folks! I kinda hate kicking off discussions like this without having a solid solution to propose or being able to promise to work on one, but this really seems important. Unfortunately I can't claim I'm gonna have time to do any concrete work on it, though I'd really *like* to. But I thought it would be worthwhile to kick around still; perhaps someone else will be inspired. I just read Hedayat's review of Fedora 25 Beta: https://hedayatvk.wordpress.com/2016/10/30/fedora-25-beta and this really jumped out at me: "And, if you care about your internet usage, make sure that you disable both dnf makecache timer, and stop PackageKit from downloading updates automatically. I don’t allow a new Fedora installation to access internet before doing these, as it might just eat a considerable amount of data." There's two things I think are somewhat unfortunate here: 1) Both dnf and GNOME Software / PackageKit default to performing fairly data-hungry transactions in the background, out of the box, without telling you about it. GNOME's is particularly bad, as it will happily download available updates in the background, which can be gigabytes worth of data. DNF only updates its metadata caches (on a systemd timer), but even that could be behaviour that users in certain circumstances really really do not want. 2) There is no particularly obvious or visible mechanism for a 'typical user' (or, if you prefer, many of the target 'personas' for our flavors) to configure this behaviour...and you have to figure out two completely *different* configuration mechanisms in order to shut off both. I think this is kind of poor behaviour on our part and we should make it better. Do I have a specific concrete proposal? No. But I do have some vague ideas. * We could have some kind of configuration interface appear on install / first boot. This would require integration with anaconda and/or initial-setup and gnome-initial-setup. * We could invert the defaults and have the apps ask the user if they want to enable data-hungry background operations on first interaction: the first time you use dnf (without -y) it could say 'hey, do you want to turn on background cache refreshes?' Similarly, the first time you run GNOME Software or click on an update notification, it could say 'hey, do you want to turn on background update downloads'? * We could at least make both of them respect one single config setting for 'do data hungry background operations' (this is kinda one small part of the bigger issue that is 'dnf and PK-based stuff don't share any configuration aside from repo definitions'). Anyone have thoughts on this? Any DNF or Software devs want to say I'm totally wrong and an idiot? Anyone inspired to do something more concrete than a mailing list post? :) -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
