[pacman-dev] What to do with pacsysclean and pacsize?

[Dave Reisner]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2014 at 09:33:24AM +0100, Pierre Neidhardt wrote:
> On 14-11-20 15:33:33, Allan McRae wrote:
> > pacsysclean is broken... In short it only looks for KiB in output to
> > assess file size, whereas pacman now outputs the correct thing. See [1].
> >  No-one has bothered to fix this.
> > 
> > pacsize was submitted as a replacement [2]. It currently works, but is
> > another tool that parses pacman output.
> > 
> > 
> > I think we should remove pacsysclean and not add pacsize.  There is
> > expac available (and potentially being added to the pacman codebase for
> > the next release).  [I am told expac can do the same thing but I don't
> > know how...]
> 
> Query local packages, display size in MB.
>     $ expac -Q -HM '%m\t%n'
> 
> Display size in KB, sort the output by size.
>     $ expac -Q -HK '%m\t%n' | sort -n
> 
> Align at the 14th column instead of using tabs.
>     $ expac -Q -HK '%14m %n'
> 
> Query DB packages.
>     $ expac -S -HK '%m\t%n'
> 
> > Opinions?
> > 
> > [1] https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/41531
> > [2] https://patchwork.archlinux.org/patch/2030/
> 
> I totally agree with your suggestion: expac could easily replace paclist,
> pacsysclean/pacsize, pacsearch, and probably more.
> 
> It misses some features though:
> 
> * Colored output.

Already supported. The format string will interpret escaped ANSI color
codes. I don't see any sane way to implement default coloring.

> 
> * Fallback to DB when local entry is not found. (This is basically what
>   pacsearch is all about.)

Such a feature would not be welcome in expac. The utility decreases in
usefulness if it isn't providing exactly what the user asked for.

> * An automatic size unit adjustment as used by pacman. I think this is more than optional.

Easily implemented, but I don't see the point (for similar reasons as
given above). If you want to implement this, ask for bytes and apply
something like to size_to_human:

https://projects.archlinux.org/pacman.git/tree/scripts/library/size_to_human.sh

dR