The timer unit that ships with fwupd is set up to refresh the metadata
every hour.  This seems excessive, there aren't even updates to my
firmware evey month and daily updates seems like a more appropriate
interval.  This should also save a bit on bandwidth, both for users as
well as for upstream.

The current policy is actually very intentional.  If the daemon has up
to date metadata within the last day it will exit.

The reason it checks "once per hour" is because if you're not on network
when the timer fires or you're suspended at the time we want to make
sure you've gotten at least one check in per day.

The other angle to consider is that even if you don't have updates for
your hardware in the system, many removable devices are updatable as well.

I /suspect/ that this came in response to the CDN outage at fastly
today.  Basically you had out of date metadata and then each time it
fired it still couldn't update so it tried again each hour.

If you still disagree with the current policy can you raise this for a
discussion upstream?

https://github.com/fwupd/fwupd

The policy applied to Debian is identical to the upstream policy and I
would like to keep them consistent.