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#1 2012-09-22 00:02:08

jfu
Member
Registered: 2012-07-16
Posts: 5

Possible to make pacman less verbose?

Hi,

During updates your sometimes see pacman print a whole list of signed keys that it has been updated, even those that have not changed. Would it be possible to remove this output?

I do like package signing but I prefer not to be bothered with it at all as long as the keys seem to match. I feel it is something that should be handled behind the scenes and not confuse the user. Let's not forget that most UNIX programs only print things to the screen when something has gone wrong.

This was just a friendly suggestion. Thank you for all the hard work smile

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#2 2012-09-22 00:10:06

ngoonee
Forum Fellow
From: Between Thailand and Singapore
Registered: 2009-03-17
Posts: 7,354

Re: Possible to make pacman less verbose?

jfu wrote:

Hi,

During updates your sometimes see pacman print a whole list of signed keys that it has been updated, even those that have not changed. Would it be possible to remove this output?

I do like package signing but I prefer not to be bothered with it at all as long as the keys seem to match. I feel it is something that should be handled behind the scenes and not confuse the user. Let's not forget that most UNIX programs only print things to the screen when something has gone wrong.

This was just a friendly suggestion. Thank you for all the hard work smile

Bug tracker please, this isn't forum material, its a feature request.

Also, 'because everyone else does it that way' doesn't sound good when kids say it, and certainly not when used as a justification. Especially with vague definitions of 'everyone else'....


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#3 2012-09-22 00:33:01

2ManyDogs
Forum Moderator
Registered: 2012-01-15
Posts: 4,645

Re: Possible to make pacman less verbose?

jfu wrote:

Let's not forget that most UNIX programs only print things to the screen when something has gone wrong.

Please read this again. Is this really what you want from your package manager? I know it's not what I want.


How to post. A sincere effort to use modest and proper language and grammar is a sign of respect toward the community.

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#4 2012-09-22 13:49:01

karol
Archivist
Registered: 2009-05-06
Posts: 25,440

Re: Possible to make pacman less verbose?

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#5 2012-09-28 00:06:46

jfu
Member
Registered: 2012-07-16
Posts: 5

Re: Possible to make pacman less verbose?

@karol: Ah great. I will write my requests on the bugtracker in the future.

@ngoonee: To explain this "most UNIX programs" thing I wrote. It is a fairly well known philosophy that a program should not print to stdout if everything works as it should. Look at the how rm, cp, mv, mount, ln et.c. works, they don't tell you that what you just did worked, they only print stuff when something doesn't and they do that on stderr. These are the programs I refer to when I talk about "most UNIX programs". I thought this concept was actually well known among Linux enthusiasts.

There are good reasons behind this philosophy. Firstly printing something like writing an OK does not give you any more information compared to giving you nothing at all when you know beforehand a message not seen is a program that works. Imagine cp wrote "I copied file x to y" every time it worked and you have a script that does 50 cps in a row and all of them worked you would end up with a log with 100% useless information. Now this is not exactly true because usually programs print to stdout vs stderr and you could only redirect stderr but there are instances where you need to log non-error messages as well, probably because someone didn't care about sending errors to the correct file descriptor which is not very uncommon.

It doesn't add anything for scripting purposes either. It is much easier to check the exit status and check that it is zero than having to grep for some particular text. Often people in general write to much data to stdout, it is convenient but what they actually are doing is writing what is essentially log/debug messages to stdout. This is not what stdout is for.

I hope this explained it better.

@2ManyDogs: I don't mean pacman should remove ALL output, only the key-related stuff. The comparison was made as a reminder.

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#6 2012-09-28 00:29:43

falconindy
Developer
From: New York, USA
Registered: 2009-10-22
Posts: 4,111
Website

Re: Possible to make pacman less verbose?

jfu wrote:

@karol: Ah great. I will write my requests on the bugtracker in the future.

@ngoonee: To explain this "most UNIX programs" thing I wrote. It is a fairly well known philosophy...

I stopped reading here. pacman isn't generating this output. An install scriptlet is.

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