Adam Williamson wrote:
> 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.
IMHO, both of these are misbehaviors:
For the dnf case: I am not convinced that dnf's cronjob that always updates
metadata rather than updating it when actually needed is a win. Sure, it
helps interactivity, but at the expense of a lot of unnecessary downloads,
especially if you use dnf rarely or not at all (because you use PackageKit).
IMHO, updating metadata periodically only makes sense in user interfaces
that are actually offering updates to the user. Updating the metadata
eagerly just in case somebody will run the command later is a bad idea.
For the GNOME Software case: IMHO, downloading entire packages in the
background without asking, before even telling the user that there are
updates at all, is totally unacceptable (on ANY type of Internet
connection), and I am really glad that plasma-pk-updates does not do such a
boneheaded thing. (I do think that updating metadata to offer updates is a
helpful thing on an unmetered connection, but you are right that there needs
to be a good way to avoid doing so without an explicit request on metered
connections. I also don't think that the metered/unmetered property can
reliably be autodetected as GNOME Software tries to do.)
Kevin Kofler
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