[ale] [Rant] Fedora Package Caching

[Jim Kinney]

dnf clean all

Much faster :-)

PackageKit is the tool that automatically downloads rpms for upgrade and notifies you that updates are available in the gnome ui.

Best way to not have it happen (especially with manual cli upgrades) is to disable PakageKit from startup in systemd.

On October 3, 2017 9:04:34 PM EDT, "Ted W." <ted-lists at xy0.org> wrote:
>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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