On Thu, Dec 29, 2016 at 10:54 AM, Rick Stevens <ricks@alldigital.com> wrote:
On 12/29/2016 07:20 AM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, Dec 29, 2016 at 3:48 AM, Kalev Lember <kalevlember@gmail.com
> <mailto:kalevlember@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 12/23/2016 11:52 PM, Chris Murphy wrote:
>     > In gnome-shell if I go to restart (upper right corner, power button
>     > icon) I have an 'install pending software updates' now for two days,
>     > but there's no other notification that there are pending software
>     > updates.
>     >
>     > Is this change in behavior expected? Seems like a bug. Maybe I'll
>     > leave it alone for a couple more days and see if it continues to
>     > accumulate updates without any notification.
>
>     gnome-software notifies only once per week as per design (or more often
>     when there are pending security updates available), but at the same time
>     it does prepare the offline update as soon as it finds new updates so
>     it's possible to install the updates manually more often if you want to,
>     either through the gnome-shell shutdown dialog or from gnome-software
>     itself.
>
>     I don't think there's been a behaviour change here, unless there's a bug
>     somewhere of course.
>
>
> A side effect of this, is multiple package versions are being downloaded
> but not installed; only the latest version is installed. a.) this is
> consuming bandwidth for no purpose and b.) PackageKit only removes the
> downloaded packages that it installs, anything not installed remains
> behind to take up space, never being deleted.

Yes, item b) is bad. It's caused a lot of comment over on the users
list. IMHO, packagekit should replace any older versions of packages
it downloads so that only the latest version of a package is held in
the cache. There's no logical reason to hold obsoleted packages unless
you have a desire to be a pack rat (or should that be "packagekit rat"?)

Alternately, make holding the old packages optional (with "purge" being
the default) or doing something like dnf's "installonly_limit" thing.
Not everyone has huge disks to hold masses of outdated content.

Seems complicated.

I think whatever update checking frequency PK/gnome-software is set to use, that it commits to downloading what it needs at that time, installs those items, and cleans them up. I think problem a.) is what sets up problem b.), and it'd be easier to just stop downloading stuff it has no intention of even installing.

 
--
Chris Murphy