How to enable package caching in dnf?

Question

I started using fedora 22 and started learning dnf only to find out about two annoying facts:

• Almost every time I install or upgrade anything it has to rebuild the whole repository metadata cache all over.
• If I stopped the download of packages at 99% and re-ran the install command it would download them all over again! This is really annoying because I have a slow internet connection that drops every half an hour or so (It's an rtl8723be module, does anybody have a fix ?), so dnf essentialy becomes unusable.

How can I resolve that ?

Answer 1

Look at the keepcache parameter. I believe that it goes in /etc/dnf/dnf.conf and should read keepcache=1 or keepcache="true"

Answer 2

This command creates metadata cache for downloads:

sudo dnf makecache

To instruct dnf to be more resource-aware and to terminate immediately if it’s too soon after the last successful makecache run we add timer to it:

sudo dnf makecache timer

Answer 3

Fedora 26 here.

If I stopped the download of packages at 99% and re-ran the install command it would download them all over again! ...

That is what I thought at first, but I'm installing a great number of packages with "dnf" at the moment, and something seems to be a little bit off about how the partially successful downloads are accounted for in the status bar. If the files are available by FTP, a "reget" command may be issued to resume a partial download, even from a different mirror, or by HTTP arbitrary byte ranges may be requested for the missing portion of a partially downloaded file.