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

[Dan McGee]

On Wed, Jul 27, 2011 at 12:12 PM, Jakob Gruber <jakob.gruber at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 07/22/2011 07:19 PM, Dan McGee wrote:
>> * 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.

A "competing" product does this (trimmed for size):

$ sudo yum update
...
 Package             Arch      Version                     Repository      Size
Updating:
 kernel-headers       i386       2.6.18-238.19.1.el5        updates       1.1 M

Transaction Summary
Install       0 Package(s)
Upgrade       1 Package(s)
Total download size: 1.1 M

$ sudo yum remove kernel-headers
...
 Package             Arch      Version                     Repository      Size
Removing:
 kernel-headers      i386      2.6.18-238.19.1.el5         installed      2.2 M
Removing for dependencies:
 gcc                 i386      4.1.2-50.el5                installed      9.6 M
 gcc-c++             i386      4.1.2-50.el5                installed      6.5 M
 glibc-devel         i386      2.5-58.el5_6.4              installed      4.9 M
 glibc-headers       i386      2.5-58.el5_6.4              installed      2.0 M

Transaction Summary
Remove        5 Package(s)
Reinstall     0 Package(s)
Downgrade     0 Package(s)

So we do have the size mismatch there as well. Not sure what it does
if you are installing an RPM directly.

> 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).

Anyone else? I'm still not sure what is right here, but I'm leaning
toward a tad more explicit but still totally whacky:
sync- show "Download Size", show 0.00/-0.00/blank for to-be-removed packages
remove- show "Installed Size", all will be negative
upgrade- show "Installed Size", all will be positive, unless inducing
a removal of a different named package (do we even do this right?),
then that one will show negative installed size

> 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.
Patches welcome; I could see these being added to the size display at
the bottom.

-Dan