[arch-general] rotate pacman log?

[David Rosenstrauch]

Dan McGee wrote:
> 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.

Well, this certainly isn't an essential change, more just an "in the 
interests of cleanliness" thing.  The pacman.log doesn't get *that* out 
of hand that this is a necessity.  (If it did, we probably would have 
had a script for this by now.)

That said, though, I'd venture to say that you and Dale might be in the 
minority of users who want to keep everything.  Arch changes fast enough 
that personally I probably have never looked back in the log beyond a 
month or 2.

So in the interests of providing "sane defaults out of the box", it 
might be a good idea to provide a "sane" rotate script for the average 
user.  (e.g., rotate monthly and keep 3 or 4).  Guys like you and Dale 
would always have the option of changing the rotate script - or even 
disabling the rotation altogether.

I really don't feel that strongly either way about this though.

DR