While we're proposing ideas.... what about this: * new scriptlet function "message()", that just outputs text. * add a -Q operation to call the message() function.
Then there's really no need for scriptlet logging at all. The issue that I see with this is that often you can't keep up with the messages during a -Syu. If the messages are not logged, how can I tell which packages have messages? pacman -Q --message every package that was upgraded? Perhaps if pacman.log had something like "The following N packages had messages: foo bar baz [...]. Do pacman -Qm(?) pkgname to see these messages."
I pretty much agree with all of Dan's position on this. Even then I think the current behavior is fine. I think providing a logrotate script might be fine, but rather than having it rotate by time, is there a way that it can rotate by size? For example: when sizeof(pacman.log) >= $N mb; rotate. And never delete the old ones. In any case, if the behavior IS changed, there should definitely be a post_upgrade message and a news item about it. Not everyone follows the mailing lists, and they should still be alerted when previous behavior is changed.