On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 4:05 PM, Dan McGee <dpmcgee@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 3:49 PM, Dale Blount <dale@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> On Thu, 2008-08-07 at 15:42 -0500, Aaron Griffin wrote: >>> On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 3:38 PM, David Rosenstrauch <darose@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>> > I noticed that the pacman log doesn't get rotated. Seems like it should, as >>> > it could get rather big over time. Any particular reason why the package >>> > doesn't provide a /etc/logrotate.d/ script by default? >>> >>> I don't see a problem with that. Probably a good idea too. If you want >>> to provide a file for pacman, I'm sure Dan would be happy to include >>> it in the arch package. >> >> My only request here is that it saves at least a years worth of updates >> by default. If something breaks on my system and I don't notice it for >> a few months, I can't tell if an update broke it or not. >> >> I have a 828Kb pacman.log from a 5 year old install. Granted I don't >> -Syu as often as I should, but it still seems manageable at many times >> that on modern hardware. > > I'm actually with Dale here. I find it nice to go all the way back to > the "beginning of time" with my install so I can see exactly what may > have pulled in a now unneeded dep, etc. I just used this on my Eee > yesterday to remove unnecessary packages originally pulled in by > OpenOffice (hsqldb). I would rather old logs never get deleted; but > even more I would rather the file never get touched. > > There is a separate concern I have wanted to address for a while, and > that is the mixing of what was previously a pristine pacman.log with > the scriptlet messages. It is a great idea, but in practice, it makes > this file not near as concise as it once was. In an ideal world: > 1) pacman.log would return to only being upgrade/install/remove messages. > 2) another log file would be added that contained the verbose stuff. > pacman_messages.log or something. > 3) pacman.log never rotates/deletes. > 4) pacman_messages.log rotates/deletes. > > What do people think of this? While we're proposing ideas.... what about this: * new scriptlet function "message()", that just outputs text. * add a -Q operation to call the message() function. Then there's really no need for scriptlet logging at all.
