Description of problem: ----------------------- I noticed a dramatic increase in data plan exhaustion since I moved to F18. Turns out Offline Update really works but at additional expense. It violates the User's Data-Plan budget and imposes an increase in internet spending. Perusing PackageKit.conf didnt help much since the only provision made to ease the situation is by disabling access to Update-testing repositories. Invariably, packagekit+systemd still fetches from any Repo that showcases updated packages. There is no toggle to prevent downloads entirely. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): ------------------------------------------------------------- 0.8.6-1.fc18 How reproducible: ----------------- Consistent Steps to Reproduce: ------------------ 1. Acquire F18 2. Connect to the Internet and that's it 3. run yum some days after a repo update and you should find some bold texted packages signifying the presence of locally available packages fetched via background download. Actual results: --------------- Packages are being downloaded without the knowledge and consent of the user. This behaviour is similar to Windows Update except that, in Windows, users are presented with the choice of disabling the feature during installation (or afterwards) Expected results: ----------------- This feature is good but should either be "off" by default or it should provide an interface UI/configuration-entry through which users can decide if they want automatic downloads. Additional info: ---------------- Internet is still considerably expensive in Africa. Allowing updates to gulp expensive bandwidths without the Users prior knowledge puts Fedora in bad light especially from an African Fedora Ambassador's experience. Providing a way of disabling background downloads will be a highly acceptable compromise.
You don't have to be in Africa to want to control when large downloads happen - it's completely unreasonable for an update to enable functionality like this that suddenly starts making large downloads at arbitrary times without the user's consent.
It seems there is a way to turn this off, it just isn't exposed anywhere as far as I can see so you have to use gsettings to access it. The magic command is: gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.updates auto-download-updates false
Run gpk-application ("Software" in the overview), open "Software Sources" from the application menu, set Check for updates to 'Never'. If that doesn't stop the automatic download of updates, please reopen this bug.
Well checking for updates and automatically downloading updates are two rather different things - you might be perfectly happy to be notified when there is an update but want to choose when to download it. So yes, the UI allows access to the frequency-get-updates setting, but not to the auto-download-updates setting.