[arch-general] rotate pacman log?

[Dan McGee]

On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 3:49 PM, Dale Blount <dale at archlinux.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-08-07 at 15:42 -0500, Aaron Griffin wrote:
>> On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 3:38 PM, David Rosenstrauch <darose at darose.net> wrote:
>> > 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?

-Dan