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

[Xavion]

>
> 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?
>

I don't know, you're the one telling the story.  I just want the "-{Q,S}i"
colours to be consistent with the rest of 'pacman'.  Including my patch is
the best (known) way to achieve this.


> 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.
>

I don't agree with that.  I think the core colours (repository, name,
version, and groups) should be consistent across all commands/switches.  To
not have this makes 'pacman' look amateurish in my opinion.


> 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.
>

That's what we want, as far as I'm concerned.  Also, having the colours
makes it quicker to find the uncoloured fields as well.  For example, it
won't take long for our brains to learn/remember that 'licenses' is right
above (the blue-coloured) 'groups'.


> 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.
>

The worst thing we can possibly do is leave "-{Q,S}i" in its current
(uncoloured) state.  People who don't want to see coloured output should
disable the 'Color' flag in "/etc/pacman.conf".