[arch-general] Suppressing specific pacman warnings

[Eli Schwartz]

On 04/01/2017 11:14 AM, João Miguel via arch-general wrote:
> First of all, why is this a warning? What is the problem of me having a
> newer version of a package than the repository? --quiet does not help. I
> could do

Why would a mismatch between what is expected and what is actually
there, *not* be something to warn the user about?

> 
>  # pacman -Syu 2>/dev/null
> 
> but this supresses *all* warnings. Also if I need to hold ignore a few
> packages, I get this (which actually makes more sense as a warning):
> 
> warning: haskell-src-exts: ignoring package upgrade (1.17.1-8 => 1.18.2-4)
> 
> which I know already, since I'm the one who put it IgnorePkg. I looked
> in the manpage for pacman.conf and also found nothing to quiet specific
> warnings like this. Could they at least be less verbose? Say, in one line:
> 
> warning: ignoring (42) package updates (for nvidia, nvidia-dkms,
> haskell-src-exts, ...)

This would result in some extremely long lines, but I am not really sure
why you have 42 packages ignored anyway. So I am not entirely sure how
much this would help your case.

> I found this old bug report (https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/31594)
> regarding this, but there's no decision about it.
> 
> I'd like there to be an option to quiet these, possibly in pacman.conf:
> 
> QuietWarning = NewerThanRepo | IgnoredUpdate | ...
> 
> What do you think? Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
> João Miguel

If pacman is going to output such messages in the first place, offering
to ignore them strikes me as unwise.

The whole reason for outputting such messages to begin with, IMHO, is to
alert the user that something unexpected (packages from the future) is
going on, or they are performing a risky action (ignoring packages).

It is hardly a huge burden to see them, since after all you are looking
at the output of an interactive program which already emits lots of
other information you are expected to read, some of which is
interspersed with stuff you don't really have to pay attention to
(progress bars).
In short, important information is important, and should be seen...

...

Though, personally, if I fork a repo package I add it to my [custom]
repo which has priority. So I never see the state of the official repos.

-- 
Eli Schwartz

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