Hey :)
I'm afraid this will likely be whishlist/wontfix... Let me explain:
2016-12-09 6:49 GMT+01:00 Josh Triplett <j...@joshtriplett.org>:
> Package: appstream
> Version: 0.10.4-1
> Severity: normal
>
> A default desktop install pulls in appstream, by way of gnome ->
> gnome-core -> gnome-software -> appstream. Installing appstream,
> whether used or not, will cause apt to download the appstream metadata
> and icons for every apt source. This would make sense if downloaded
> when gnome-software or a similar program that needed it ran; however,
> this data gets downloaded even when updating with console-only package
> managers like apt or aptitude.
We can not know what the user does in advance - we only know that they
installed AppStream, and if they do so, it should work. GNOME Software
will not work without appstream being installed, and even if you are
not using any GUI, you might still want to have the utility to e.g.
install missing formware automatically or search for applications on
the command-line.
> In a default install, please avoid affecting the time and bandwidth
> consumed by updates done via entirely text-based apt frontends.
The data is part of the archive metadata, and it needs to match the
"regular" packages files - data being out of sync will lead to bad
user experience (e.g. we would have data for packages already removed
from the archive, or outdated data, or simply wrong data).
You can disable the downloading of icons in your sources.list file if
that is too much, but even then you will cripple GNOME Software (the
appstream cli tool will be fine in that case though). In any case, I
will not ship a package which, once installed, does not work. Every
tool using the AppStream framework depends on the data being present
and ready to use.
As soon as a stable release is out there, the data won't change
anymore too, so the bandwidth used should be relatively small.
There are a few ideas to make AS use less bandwidth (binary diffs,
splitting l10n data) but that would need someone to implement the
features - and at least currently I have not enough time for that.
There's also a separate bug report for that.
> Alternatively, please arrange to have appstream or gnome-software become
> a Recommends (rather than a Depends) of a default desktop install.
The appstream package can't be a recommends of GNOME Software, because
it pretty much breaks GS (w/o appstream, GS will not show any apps or
- in the best case - only show installed apps, which is bad usability
(as soon as the user removed an app, they have no way to add it back
via GS)).
Making GNOME Software a recommends of the GNOME metapackage is
possible though - I assume it's currently not recommended though
because it is part of core GNOME and also required for things like
editing the app groups in the GNOME Shell.
In any case, it would be useful to direct that request to the right
team/package (tasksel, the GNOME team).
Cheers,
Matthias
P.S: How slow is your connection, actually? I am not behind the
fastest connection and the AppStream data downloads are done really
quickly. The icon tarball is a bit more annoying, but it doesn't
change that often too, at least if you are not running unstable.
Icon downloads can be disabled per-source in sources.list by changing
the sources line to something like:
deb [Acquire::IndexTargets::deb::DEP-11-icons=false] uri suite
components (not tested)
Or drop in an apt.conf snippet disabling it, that way you don't need
to touch the one shipped by AppStream.
