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

[Dan McGee]

On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 4:15 PM, Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

If I upgrade 59 packages and 3 of them spit out messages but I closed
my console, what do I do?

-Dan