Bug#1065072: packagekit spinning cpu

[Matthias Klumpp]

Am Sa., 9. März 2024 um 07:30 Uhr schrieb Joey Hess <id at joeyh.name>:
>
> Joey Hess wrote:
> > It may also be relevant somehow that the topmost update was a thinkpad
> > AMD firmware update which "requires restart".
>
> I masked and stopped packagekit again and now in gnome-software, it
> displays only the thinkpad amd firmware update, and it's no longer
> alternating with the loading updates screen.
> This makes me think that firmware update is not related to the problem.
>
> The other updates gnome-software displays when packagekit is running are
> debian package updates. My last upgrade was an apt-get safe-upgrade,
> because dist-upgrade wants to remove several packages, including gnome.
> (I'm tracking unstable, this is typical transient dependency issues I
> suppose. Also I have bluez on hold at an older version due to #1060224)
>
> So maybe gnome-software gets confused in this kind of situation and keeps
> retrying?

That is the current hypothesis, yes - the change that broke this was
introduced by Fedora, and they do not observe this behavior. So,
either GNOME Software is wrong (I think it unconditionally has a
problem, it should never retry a cache refresh at that insane
frequency), or the APT backend in PackageKit does something wrong and
emits package changes for blocked packages when it shouldn't do so.
I guess as soon as your system is up-to-date (with no blocked
packages), this issue will go away temporarily.

TBH, at this point I think there's probably a bug in GS as well as in
PK-Apt, but we haven't found the culprit yet (except for the GS patch
that caused this issue to appear,
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/commit/b8cf52e9c001064eebfe86ce8555501541ca211e
)

Cheers,
    Matthias

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