On Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:46:04 +0400
Oleg Finkelshteyn
I've noticed the following behaviour which makes it somewhat difficult to use -Qi/-Si/etc. in a pipeline:
$ pacman -Si binutils ... Description : A set of programs to assemble and manipulate binary and object files $ pacman -Si binutils | cat Description : A set of programs to assemble and manipulate binary and object files
I'd expect pacman not word-wrapping the output in the second case, as it breaks the line-oriented nature of data. This happens because getcols() defaults to 80 when !isatty(1), but I'd rather like it not to word-wrap at all in this case, as we're outputting to something like a file or a pipe. In the former case, some text processing tool could do better anyway, and the current behavior makes the latter case hardly useful at all.
Does that make sense? Basically I'm suggesting (maybe) getting rid of the isatty() check in getcols() and adding one around word-wrapping code in indentprint() and list_display(). An attempt at implementing the proposal above can be found at http://rain.ifmo.ru/~olegfink/pacman-wrap.patch (sorry for not inlining, I use gmail). Maybe there should be more code shared between the two routines, e.g. getcols() could return -1 when word wrapping shouldn't be done.
Any thoughts?
Thanks, oleg
I've personally been bothered by this: it's probably related/same issue: pacman -Qi libsoup (...) Depends On : glib2>=2.20.4 gnutls>=2.8.1 libxml2>=2.7.3 libproxy>=0.2.3 sqlite3>=3.6.15 gconf>=2.26.0-3 (...) pacman -Qi libsoup | grep Depends Depends On : glib2>=2.20.4 gnutls>=2.8.1 libxml2>=2.7.3 libproxy>=0.2.3 Dieter