I have a Fedora 25 installed.
Whenever I run dnf install < package name > specifically Nodejs, it automatically starts downloading Fedora x86-64 and Fedora x86-64 updates.
What exactly is happening ?
How can I avoid this if possible as I have limited data resources.
Thank you in advance.
It does not download updates, but the menadata, if they are not updated for some time.
The metadata (package list of latest versions) is needed to know what package version to download. If it would not download this metadata, you could possibly end up with installing some old version with various bugs or security issues (at worst).
What exactly is happening ?
This is called Metadata Synchronization. When you local dnf metadata is getting expired, dnf tries to download up to date metadata from remote repositories. This process takes some time and costs bandwidth.
How can i avoid this if possible as i have limited data resources.
You can run dnf install with --cacheonly, but you may get not most up to date version of package in this case. See documentation:
-C, --cacheonly
Run entirely from system cache, don’t update the cache and use it even in case it is expired.
DNF uses a separate cache for each user under which it executes. The cache for the root user is called the system cache. This switch allows a regular user read-only access to the system cache which usually is more fresh than the user’s and thus he does not have to wait for metadata sync.
