F40 Change Proposal: DNFConditionalFilelists (System-Wide)

[jkolarik (Jan Kolarik)]

Based on the data provided by Jarda, I’ve updated the Bug 2180842 with tracking issues related to file dependencies. And to sum up, the state still remains as Zbigniew have already stated, we’re good to go. 3 pull requests are created to fix the issues and everything else is covered.

[zbyszek (Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek)]

@jkolarik

Speaking about the dynamically loading filelists, I’d love to have such a feature in dnf. But as of now, it appears to require a substantial amount of non-trivial work, involving the refactoring of numerous existing blocks in the dnf/libdnf codebase. I don’t think handling this for F40 is realistic. Moreover, given that it impacts essential parts of the code, I view it as a considerable risk. I think it’s better to plan such a feature for DNF5, where workflows are better streamlined.

OK. I would be against scoping any big work for dnf-4. If it was just some simple thing, we could discuss it. But if it’s “nontrivial”, then it doesn’t make sense.

@jmracek

In case that dnf will not have downloaded filelists then there is a chance that file described in repomd is not available anywhere, because metadata were updated. This might happened with Fedora updates repository. The repository is set to refresh metadata not before 6h metadata_expire=6h. When this happens DNF has only bad options - mark all repositories with not downloadable filelists as expired and fail or start loading and updating all repositories from scratch.

In other words, even if we implemented dynamic loading of the file lists, the behaviour wouldn’t be great. I now understand the proposed approach with having this controlled by a config option.

@jmracek

We have a plan to provide a message with a suggestion that downloading filelist might resolve the issue including a description how to do it from command line.

That’s great. I think this is the last missing bit for this proposal to be feature-complete.

[jkolarik (Jan Kolarik)]

I’ve updated the Upgrade/compatibility impact section to include details on DNF’s behavior in the event of being unable to resolve the transaction.

[jkolarik (Jan Kolarik)]

Thanks for the suggestion. I’ve updated the Scope section of the proposal accordingly.

[casey128 (Casey)]

I’m excited for this as the huge RPM metadata is easily Fedora’s main biggest wart for me. The memory pressure from postprocessing the filelists and solving dependencies renders Fedora unusable on VMs with 512mb or 1gb RAM, leaving Debian or Ubuntu as pretty much the only realistic options for such VM instances. Are there any benchmarks for the memory usage and metadata download size with and without filelists?

[yump (R Haley)]

Something seems to have gone wrong with the part where provides is supposed to still work for files located in /usr/bin.

[system]

How do you feel about the proposal as written?

• Strongly in favor
• In favor, with reservations
• Neutral
• Opposed, but could be convinced
• Strongly opposed

If you are in favor but have reservations, or are opposed but something could change your mind, please explain in a reply.

We want everyone to be heard, but many posts repeating the same thing actually makes that harder. If you have something new to say, please say it. If, instead, you find someone has already covered what you’d like to express, please simply give that post a instead of reiterating. You can even do this by email, by replying with the heart emoji or just “+1”. This will make long topics easier to follow.

Please note that this is an advisory “straw poll” meant to gauge sentiment. It isn’t a vote or a scientific survey. See About the Change Proposals category for more about the Change Process and moderation policy.