[ale] [Rant] Fedora Package Caching

Pete Hardie pete.hardie at gmail.com
Tue Oct 3 21:52:35 EDT 2017


I had this problem when I upgraded to 26....

On Tue, Oct 3, 2017 at 9:23 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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-- 
Pete Hardie
--------
Better Living Through Bitmaps
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