The comment on that task on #440 is:

 # N.B. using ansible dnf module is very slow

which TBH I suspect is a misunderstanding, this is the first dnf task so I suspect it is just updating the metadata. From memory this was causing problems with Azimuth/caas slurm?

However given we deliberately swapped away from the dnf module because it wasn't working for us, I'm not going to revert that without some tests demonstrating we understand and fixed the problem somewhere else.

Thank you @sjpb for the review.

What I really want to fix is the task showing as changed when it is not.

We could add a dnf check-upgrade command with changed_when: false to perform the initial metadata sync.
And then the dnf module to remove cockpit which handles changed correctly.

Or we could inspect the output of dnf remove for "No package to remove" or "Nothing to do" to compute the changed_when value.

How would you suggest reproducing the issues with the dnf module?

How would you suggest reproducing the issues with the dnf module?

I don't know tbh, this was a bit of a "quick fix" TBH!