[arch-general] What do you do with pacman.log? Periodically archive? Delete?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 18 Jun 2020 02:12:28 -0400, Eli Schwartz via arch-general wrote:
>On 6/18/20 2:09 AM, David C. Rankin wrote:
>> This is more of what is the recommended practice ... for handling
>> pacman.log?
>> 
>>   Strange question, yes, but pacman.log is one of those that never
>> gets rotated, etc.. The information in it isn't useful after a few
>> upgrade cycles. So what is the general practice for dealing with it?
>> 
>>   o Periodically delete it?
>>   o Split it by year with awk and compress it for?? Historical
>> reasons? o Keep the last year?
>> 
>>   It not one of those things I've ever thought about before, but
>> grepping (after cleaning up the wide-character right-arrow from
>> 2017/18 timeframe), I checked and I have 5M of log dating back to
>> 2013. It's not hurting anything, but that got me thinking? What do
>> others do with it, and is there any recommended manner for dealing
>> with it?
>> 
>>   I don't see any reason for keeping much of it beyond what you may
>> be asked to post as part of a bug-report, etc.. which usually
>> wouldn't be more than the last couple of months for most packages..
>> 
>>   man 8 pacman doesn't provide any options for dealing with how much
>> to keep or to truncate.  
>
>Among other things, it serves as a handy way to tell when you first
>installed the system. :)
>
>I have so many better places to save 5mb of disk space, this doesn't
>even register in the top 400.

From 2013-02-17 02:54 until today its size became 13.7 MB on my install.
I "collect" all local build packages in three cache directories,
current/, old/ and very_old/. At the moment I don't feel the need to
delete anything. In case of emergency I would delete the very old
packages, not a small log file.
FWIW I regularly run 'pacman -Sc'.
I could imagine to 'mv' /var/log/pacman.log to
/var/log/pacman.log-2020... if there should be the need to get rid of
clutter, such as output of pacman typos, if it one day should become
annoying to use search with 'grep'. However, since the file is that
small and the complete history could become important, I don't remove it.