Bug#850522: gnome-software: demote appstream to Recommends

[Matthias Klumpp]

2017-01-07 18:27 GMT+01:00 Ritesh Raj Sarraf <rrs at debian.org>:
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> On Sat, 2017-01-07 at 16:08 +0100, Matthias Klumpp wrote:
>> GNOME Software needs AppStream to work properly, and we already only
>> download the smallest amount of icons. I think there is something else
>> wrong with your system, since AppStream data is only around 10MB per
>> suite, not 40.
>> In any case, this is something we can't fix.
>
> Then perhaps you should reassign it to appstream and not let it download 10 MiB
> of data, by default, for every suite.
>
> apt-file had some similar integration with apt, but they do have it documented
> on how to change. Nothing such is mentioned for appstream.
>
> And yes, that 40 MiB is in total, for I have 3 suites configured (testing,
> stable and experimental). But I don't see that as being wrong.

We already have open bugs on appstream requesting delta downloads
(patches welcome).
And you can modify what gets downloaded:
```
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.
```

In any case, doing so will break GNOME Software.

Cheers,
    Matthias

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