[pacman-dev] Please make the colourised output exactly like that of "pacman-color"

[Simon Gomizelj]

>> What bothered me about the pacman-color patch was how half-hazard the
>> -Si/-Qi colouring is. The important bits (to me, of course) aren't
>> colourized. The repository and URL are not very important. Dependency
>> information, on the other hand, is. 90% of the time I search the pacman
>> database, what I care about is the description and the dependencies -
>> both demphasized with their implemented colouring scheme.
>
> Maybe the description and dependencies can be given other colours once my
> patch is included.

You only have a pallet of 8 colours you can reasonably work with and
they're almost all allocated. The full table has around 30 unique rows,
which show depends on various conditions. Which are important enough to
allocate a colour too?

>> By attempting to colourizing individual fields IMHO we'll either end up
>> with a soup of colours that ends up more distracting then informational,
>> or we make the wrong choice, emphasizing the wrong stuff and making the
>> output harder to read. The current way is at least a nice balance that
>> doesn't fall into either pitfalls.
>
> In order to be consistent, the repository, name, version, and groups should
> all be coloured.

I don't think this is a particularly strong argument, output already
isn't very consistent: sometimes we output tables (-i), other times
information is much more condensed and inlined (-s). This would be a
different story if the table showed "core/linux 4.5.1-1" instead of
separate Repo, Name and Version rows.

As much as I had stated regret for putting as much colour in the
condensed view as I did, it at least works because it makes the dense
information more distinct. I don't think the argument is anywhere near
as strong for the tabled output. Colourization here will have the effect
of drawing the eye to specific fields.

Just consider the shear amount of disagreement in this thread over
workflows and which fields are important to who. Maybe we shouldn't be
trying to mark certain fields as important and let the information be on
equal footing. I appreciate your efforts to try and make pacman more
consistent, but this is a value call.

I vote for sticking to keeping things neutral.