Fedora Still Needs Help Testing The New Zchunk Metadata Support

Fedora has been working on transitioning to Zchunk for its DNF metadata due to its good compression ratio while being delta-friendly and leveraging the existing work of Zstandard and Zsync/casync. The metadata has been offered in Zchunk for some weeks while more client testing is needed before landing that support in Rawhide and in turn for Fedora 30.

The goal of this Zchunk metadata for Fedora is to speed-up DNF operations by needing to download less metadata. While the server bits are in place, additional client testing is desired before landing the updated packages in Fedora Rawhide where it will affect all users on this development build of Fedora ahead of the Fedora 30 release due out in the spring.

See this earlier article for more details on the Fedora Zchunk efforts. New today is a new call for testing of the libdnf/librepo client bits for those running Rawhide. Until the packages land there, a Copr repository can be setup for testing this support.

Jon Dieter further explained in this latest call for testing, "If the second day's repository download size for Rawhide is less than 54MB, you'll know everything's working correctly... I've been testing it on Rawhide for the last three weeks or so, and the minimum I've downloaded has been about 1.2MB (updating every day), while the max today was about 7.9MB (haven't updated for over a week). So far, I haven't hit any bugs, but I've only been regularly testing DNF in the terminal. I did do initial testing with PackageKit and microdnf, and they worked fine too."