File Size: 0 B for Foreign packages

[oech3]

Any Foreign packages reports File Size: 0 B while packages from repository does not.

Install Size: looks correct.

[stevenbenner]

Thanks for the bug report. Yep, I see the same on my machine. Somehow I have never noticed this.

That value comes from alpm_pkg_get_size(). Checking the documentation, it even notes that behavior:

This is only available for sync database packages and package files, not those loaded from the local database.

Which makes sense now that I think about it.

The package size it is referring to is the size of the compressed archive (e.g. pacfinder-1.2-1-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst). Local packages are not indexed in a proper syncdb and can potentially be installed from anywhere via makepkg. So there isn't any way to say for sure how large the original package was. They are also not cached in /var/cache/pacman, so there is no hope of tracking down the original package file to stat file info.

I can think of a couple ways to handle this:

1. Omit the row from local packages
   This is probably the least confusing user experience. Simply don't show the "File Size" row. If the data isn't presented in PacFinder then there isn't even going to be a question about what the data means. There's a sound argument to be made that this isn't relevant data for local packages anyway - since the original archive files are not cached by pacman and are not taking up space in the filesystem managed by pacman. However an astute user might then notice the missing data and wonder why it is not shown.

2. Report "unknown" or "not available for local packages"
   This is probably the most honest solution. Rather than omit it, try to explain that the data isn't available. Have to be mindful to choose wording that makes it very clear that there isn't anything wrong with the user's system, it is just unknown information about the package. I worry that this will make users immediately ask "well, why is it unknown?", and cause frustration.

3. Show the "Install Size" value in the "File Size" row
   It's sort of true. We don't know the size of the original archive, but we do know how big the unpacked content is. However, my gut feeling is that it is wrong and potentially misleading.

I'm leaning towards option 2. But I'm unsure what wording would be best. It is challenging to be both concise and informative in such a small field.

[oech3]

4. Drop this feature for every package keeping Install Size.

[stevenbenner]

Yeah, that might be a good option.

The primary purpose of the archive file size data is so that pacman can show the download size and download progress. It isn't particularly useful to someone just browsing packages. The only way I could imagine a PacFinder user wanting that data is to see that something like cuda is "only" 2.7GB to download/cache, even though it is 7GB installed. Which seems like a somewhat far-fetched use case.