[ale] [Rant] Fedora Package Caching

Jim Kinney jim.kinney at gmail.com
Tue Oct 3 22:45:12 EDT 2017


Still poking at this:

pkcon refresh force -c -1

Dumps the current cache and sets age to keep files to 0. I manually removed an old 25 dir as the test system is 26.

Yeah. Buggy. Must be gnome :-)

On October 3, 2017 9:52:35 PM EDT, Pete Hardie <pete.hardie at gmail.com> wrote:
>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
>>>
>>>
>> --
>> Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. All tyopes are thumb
>related
>> and reflect authenticity.
>>
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>
>
>-- 
>Pete Hardie
>--------
>Better Living Through Bitmaps

-- 
Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. All tyopes are thumb related and reflect authenticity.
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