Arch Linux

Pacman should output messages about .pacnew files after it is done with
updating packages, not meanwhile every package is being updated. The messages
should be collected and displayed at the end, when pacman is done with
everything.

I've discussed this on the #archlinux IRC channel, and I was being told this
feature would be called bloat.
It's not bloat, it's just *moving* a few of pacman's outputted messages to
another place, namely at the end after it's done updating. You could call it a
"summary" about the .pacnew files. This would be nice to have, since then you
don't have to use "yes | pacman -Syu | less" or
"pacman -Syu && updatedb && slocate *.pacnew".

I'm not saying I need this feature, but I find it helpful and I'm sure a lot of
users (especially newcomers) will love this feature.

One might argue that it's not the responsibility of the tool and that it does
not conform to the UNIX philosophy "do one thing and do it well". This isn't
true since in this case, pacman is doing one thing not well, namely being user
friendly. Simply *moving* the messages from the output of pacman to the
end of its output makes it more *friendly* to see what the user needs to do.
It's not bloat, it's just moving some output of a feature that was already
there. If you say it is bloat, then you might as well remove the feature of
telling the user about .pacnew files at all, since that is the real feature.
I'm just giving a suggesting about how to make the existing feature more
*useful*.

Also you can say the user should read everything pacman says anyway, but there
are priorities to what the user should read. For example:
--> It is recommended to use qjackctl as a controlling frontend for the
--> audio server. The extended rights for realtime capabilities can be
--> granted based on groups or a per user base in
--> /etc/security/limits.conf
Thinks like that are relatively unimportant since one might not want to use
qjackctl at all. Thus, updating .pacnew files should be seen as a higher
priority, since important system files might have to be updated. So, it might
be helpful to move the high priority items to the end of pacman's output.
Though, this feature request is merely limited to .pacnew files.

You could say a user should always know what to do, because the user is the
system administrator. But just moving a message is helpful in this case, it's
not trying to make the user more dumb, it's just a reminder.
(And if you do say that the user is responsible for doing everything on their
own and the system should manage nothing on its own, you might as well remove
the automated process of updating the kernel image with mkinitcpio after a
kernel upgrade. Since, after all, the user should do it.)