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

[David C. Rankin]

On 06/18/2020 02:03 AM, Andy Pieters wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Jun 2020 at 07:51, Ralf Mardorf via arch-general <
> arch-general at archlinux.org> wrote:
> 
>> 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.
>>
> Same here, I made some awk scripts to format it but I will never ever
> delete it. Why would you want to delete a log of what packages were
> installed and removed?

Thanks Ralf, Andy,

  I didn't go looking to delete or remove anything. I went to fix grep
reporting pacman.log as binary data due to the html/UTF-8 '→' that was written
to the log numerous time during the late 2017 - 2018 timeframe. After fixing
the log, then I wondered if there was anything I should do with it since it
went back to 7 years.

  Storage isn't an issue:

# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md1         50G   23G   27G  47% /
tmpfs            16G  4.0K   16G   1% /tmp
/dev/md0        469M  106M  351M  24% /boot
/dev/md2        865G  510G  355G  59% /home
/dev/md4        2.7T  945G  1.8T  35% /home/data

So for know -- we will just do nothing with it. If push came to shove either
writing a quick wrapper to pacman to xz unzip/zip or splitting it by year, or
some other sane criteria may be an option.

-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.