[ale] [Rant] Fedora Package Caching

[Ted W.]

Today my laptop warned me that disk space on / was running low. After
investigation I found out the source was /var/cache/PackageKit. It was
taking up over **24GB** of space of my 50GB root partition. 50GB!!!

My first question was, what the heck is PackageKit and why is it eating
half of my root partition (10% of my ENTIRE DISK)!? Thinking it was
something to do with the standard package caching, I looked to `dnf` and
`pkcon` for help. Found a solution to purge some cached files. This
helped but didn't really make a noticeable dent. Looks like most of the
files were in /var/cache/PackageKit/25.... 25... I'm on Fedora 26! Why
the heck is 10% of my disk being used by packages cached from a version
of Fedora I'm not even running!

Turns out Gnome3 is trying to be "helpful" and in their all knowing
ways, the developers have thought it would be "correct" if they enabled
download caching for ALL packages you update BY DEFAULT. Even if you've
_never_used_the_graphical_package_manager!

W  T  F

Thankfully, there was an easy fix to all of this:

Remove the files:
`# find /var/cache/PackageKit -type f -name \*.rpm -exec rm {} +`

Turn off auto downloading:
`# gsettings set org.gnome.software download-updates false`

I've gotten mostly used to Gnome3 since it was made the default in
Fedora many years ago but sometimes I still find things like this that
really grind my gears. Defaults that try to be "helpful" and have
absolutely no sanity checking to ensure they're not doing something
completely and utterly brain dead!

Original bug report: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=80053
StackExchange post: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/265755/fedora-23-can-i-safely-delete-files-in-var-cache-packagekit-metadata-updates

</rant>

- Ted
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