[pacman-dev] [PATCH 1/2] Combine add and removal package list display

[Jakob Gruber]

On 07/22/2011 07:19 PM, Dan McGee wrote:
> There was no real reason for these to be done separately.
>
> Signed-off-by: Dan McGee<dan at archlinux.org>
> ---
>
> A bit of WIP here. Try it out to see what it does, but it addresses Allan's
> issue with upgrade size being all whacky when replaces are involved, among
> other things. http://paste.pocoo.org/show/444372/ for some example output with
> VerbosePkgLists on, http://paste.pocoo.org/show/444368/ with them off. Not sure
> what to do with the corny '[removal]' tag bit though.
>
> Notes:
> * The size column is now net changed size per package, so only new packages or
>    totally removed packages will usually have big values (wireshark-cli is buggy
>    in the package itself, as noticed by Dave and I).

I'm not sure I agree with this. During a typical 'pacman -Syu', the net 
changed size will be ~0.00 MiB for nearly all packages, making the 
column more or less useless for the most commonly used operation.

Unfortunately, I don't have an ideal solution.

Currently, the size column displays installed size for removal lists and 
and package size for install / upgrade lists. I can think of two issues 
with this:

   1) the column header is always 'Size' and it isn't clear enough about 
what's actually being displayed; and
   2) displayed different things in the same column might be 
confusing/misleading; of course it gets much worse if removal and sync 
targets are shown in the same list.

On the other hand, it feels correct to display sizes like this. During 
sync operations I want to know about package sizes, and when removing 
packages I want to know how much disk space is regained. It's also easy 
to pick out the largest packages during a large -Syu at a glance.

The only other option I can think of with a merged removal / sync list 
is install size, which might be worth a try (even though I believe I'd 
prefer seeing download size for -S targets).


tl;dr - in my opinion we should either stick to the old display with 
separate removal and sync lists (and fix the column header), or display 
install size in a merged list.

P.S.: It might also be nice to keep the removal / sync target count 
instead of only displayed a total target count.


> * Packages are now always sorted in alpha order, rather than the half-sorted,
>    dep resolved mess we had before.
> * -R ops will show the same format as -U, even though the new version column
>    will now always be blank. I think the consistency win is worth it. They will
>    also always show the '[removal]' tag bit, so suggestions for that are
>    welcome.
> * Yes, you get 4 different totals now on -S operations, but since the damn
>    package list is so long anyway, who cares.

All of this sounds good to me.