[pacman-dev] [arch-general] rotate pacman log?

[Aaron Griffin]

On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 4:05 PM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

While we're proposing ideas.... what about this:
* new scriptlet function "message()", that just outputs text.
* add a -Q operation to call the message() function.

Then there's really no need for scriptlet logging at all.