[pacman-dev] [PATCH] Show used/freed space when syncing

[Dan McGee]

On Sun, Jan 10, 2010 at 8:44 PM, Hugo Chargois <hugo.chargois at free.fr> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 2:02 AM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
>>
>> Please do not top post.
>>
>> I can not see a mention of the FR in the new patch you sent.  Did you just resend the old one?
>>
>> But getting to more a basic level with this.  What does this achieve? It is not an actual measure of additional space needed to update given it does not account for the downloaded file.  So it can not be used to check if your system will run out of space on an upgrade.

Of course this fact is available two lines above, so this is a bit of
a straw man to use in this case.

> Yeah, I can not see the new patch I sent, maybe I made a mistake. I'll
> resend it.
>
> The point is to show how much bigger the installed size of packages is
> getting. Not to show exactly what diskspace the entire transaction
> will take. Package cache can be cleaned, and if you don't have enough
> diskpace to store some packages for the time of their installation,
> you're doing it wrong and should buy a new hdd. (and well, now you
> could get this information by summing the download size and the
> used/freed space).
> I think it's good to know if packages are getting bloatier or slimmer.
> When I upload big packages and the installation size is 300 MB, I
> don't know if I will actually have 100 MB freed on my disk because the
> previous versions were 400, or if I will lose 100 because they were
> 200. If it's plus 100, well maybe I'd think of replacing some programs
> by lighter ones, if it's minus 100 well great (but maybe some
> functionalities were moved to a new package which I'd want to
> install?).
> Aptitude/apt-get shows that information in lieu of the "Total
> Installed Size", and I think that's much more sensible.

The naming is not my favorite, but that may be a detail we can get
around. Instead of "Total Size Used/Freed:", hmm. It is something more
like "Total Installed Size Delta", but that sucks more than what you
came up with.

As a side note, "% .2f MB" will never work as a format- that is
"%<space>.2f MB" and will not work as expected. I didn't check if that
got fixed in a later patch, but just an FYI.

Are there widespread objections to this patch? I like the idea, but I
also worry we are getting quite cluttered here with junk that some
people might care less about, and as Allan said, this isn't a very
valid substitute for a disk space check.

-Dan