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

[Aaron Griffin]

On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 4:30 PM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

Honesty: Don't close the console after an upgrade, you knob.
Realism: Ok, so there is a case for logging, sure, but the message
function is kinda neat