Re: [pacman-dev] [arch-general] rotate pacman log?

On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 4:15 PM, Aaron Griffin wrote:

On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 4:05 PM, Dan McGee wrote:

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On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 3:49 PM, Dale Blount wrote:

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On Thu, 2008-08-07 at 15:42 -0500, Aaron Griffin wrote:

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On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 3:38 PM, David Rosenstrauch wrote:

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I noticed that the pacman log doesn't get rotated. Seems like it should, as it could get rather big over time. Any particular reason why the package doesn't provide a /etc/logrotate.d/ script by default?

I don't see a problem with that. Probably a good idea too. If you want to provide a file for pacman, I'm sure Dan would be happy to include it in the arch package.

My only request here is that it saves at least a years worth of updates by default. If something breaks on my system and I don't notice it for a few months, I can't tell if an update broke it or not.

I have a 828Kb pacman.log from a 5 year old install. Granted I don't -Syu as often as I should, but it still seems manageable at many times that on modern hardware.

I'm actually with Dale here. I find it nice to go all the way back to the "beginning of time" with my install so I can see exactly what may have pulled in a now unneeded dep, etc. I just used this on my Eee yesterday to remove unnecessary packages originally pulled in by OpenOffice (hsqldb). I would rather old logs never get deleted; but even more I would rather the file never get touched.

There is a separate concern I have wanted to address for a while, and that is the mixing of what was previously a pristine pacman.log with the scriptlet messages. It is a great idea, but in practice, it makes this file not near as concise as it once was. In an ideal world: 1) pacman.log would return to only being upgrade/install/remove messages. 2) another log file would be added that contained the verbose stuff. pacman_messages.log or something. 3) pacman.log never rotates/deletes. 4) pacman_messages.log rotates/deletes.

What do people think of this?

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.

If I upgrade 59 packages and 3 of them spit out messages but I closed my console, what do I do? -Dan