On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 6:08 AM, Dan McGee
The naming is not my favorite, but that may be a detail we can get around. Instead of "Total Size Used/Freed:", hmm. It is something more like "Total Installed Size Delta", but that sucks more than what you came up with.
I like "Total Installed Size Delta". In fact it's what I called it in my head when I was thinking about it. I called the var that holds the value mbdeltasize, too. I finally came up with something different because first, that was too long to align with the preceding two "Total..." so it wouldn't look good, and I didn't want to touch these strings because it would have broken the translations. Secondly, I thought that maybe it was a bit non-user friendly because delta is a scientific denomination and probably not everyone is familiar with what it means. So I just used something that reminds what apt-get says because I'm familiar with it.
As a side note, "% .2f MB" will never work as a format- that is "%<space>.2f MB" and will not work as expected. I didn't check if that got fixed in a later patch, but just an FYI.
It works. <space> is a valid flag for printf formatting that means: put a space before a positive number (and of course a minus before a positive one). That way, the number is aligned with the ones from the two lines above, whether it's negative or positive, and the minus, if any, 'sticks out'.
Are there widespread objections to this patch? I like the idea, but I also worry we are getting quite cluttered here with junk that some people might care less about, and as Allan said, this isn't a very valid substitute for a disk space check.
To me, I think that this delta installed size is more important than the installed size. If I installed a package, it's that I deemed its size acceptable. I don't really care afterwards what size the update takes, I prefer knowing how it's growing. If I really want to know what size it is, I would query its info, and this has nothing to do with an update. So if had created pacman, I would probably showed delta installed size instead of installed size. But I totally understand that some people do care about the total installed size, and know it couldn't be changed anyway because people are now familiar with it. But I think it's a useful information and it well deserves an extra line. As for the disk space check, now you just have to sum the download size and the installed size delta and you have the total diskspace used. Without the delta, you have no way to know.