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

[Hugo Chargois]

On Wed, Jan 20, 2010 at 6:08 AM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

I like "Total Installed Size Delta". In fact it's what I called it in
my head when I was thinking about it. I called the var that holds the
value mbdeltasize, too.
I finally came up with something different because first, that was too
long to align with the preceding two "Total..." so it wouldn't look
good, and I didn't want to touch these strings because it would have
broken the translations. Secondly, I thought that maybe it was a bit
non-user friendly because delta is a scientific denomination and
probably not everyone is familiar with what it means. So I just used
something that reminds what apt-get says because I'm familiar with it.

> 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.

It works. <space> is a valid flag for printf formatting that means:
put a space before a positive number (and of course a minus before a
positive one). That way, the number is aligned with the ones from the
two lines above, whether it's negative or positive, and the minus, if
any, 'sticks out'.

> 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.

To me, I think that this delta installed size is more important than
the installed size. If I installed a package, it's that I deemed its
size acceptable. I don't really care afterwards what size the update
takes, I prefer knowing how it's growing. If I really want to know
what size it is, I would query its info, and this has nothing to do
with an update. So if had created pacman, I would probably showed
delta installed size instead of installed size. But I totally
understand that some people do care about the total installed size,
and know it couldn't be changed anyway because people are now familiar
with it. But I think it's a useful information and it well deserves an
extra line.

As for the disk space check, now you just have to sum the download
size and the installed size delta and you have the total diskspace
used. Without the delta, you have no way to know.