How to prevent command output lines to be concatenated?

[Ricky-Tigg]

Hello. During an upgrade 'dnf5 upgrade', I noticed as part of the output a string related to a warning which spanned the entire width of the terminal window and ended concatenated. I would have liked to know what its cut part was. I consider undoing the event not to be a pertinent option.

Since DNF5 is developed for Fedora, which is itself intended to run in a systemd-controlled system, I would take the latter as a reference for comparison, as it does include the '--no-pager' option, which causes command output lines not to be concatenated. Having noticed from reading the DNF5(8) manual that there is no equivalent, I would like therefore to know if it is possible to accomplish this with DNF5 using a third-party method.

[ppisar]

DNF5 does not use any pager. It also does not truncate any output on purpose. It sometimes only wrap an output to a table. Do you have an example the problematic output?

[Ricky-Tigg]

It was meant to be "truncate" instead of "concatenate" and their respective variants in the original message.

---

terminal emulator: ptyxis

I finally find myself in the situation of reverting the transaction -'dnf history {undo,redo}' then.

$ sudo dnf history redo <event_number>
[...]
Running transaction
[...]
[ 3/15] Upgrading python3-proton-core-0:0.7.0-1.f 100% |   3.6 MiB/s | 438.8 KiB |  00m00s
[...]
>>> Scriptlet output:
>>> Warning: The unit file, source configuration file or drop-ins of me.proton.vpn.split_t
>>> Removed '/etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/me.proton.vpn.split_tunneling.ser
>>>
[...]

Truncated strings

• "Upgrading python3-proton-core-0:0.7.0-1.f"
• "Warning: The unit file, source configuration file or drop-ins of me.proton.vpn.split_t"
• "Removed '/etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/me.proton.vpn.split_tunneling.ser"

[ppisar]

Truncated strings

* "`Upgrading python3-proton-core-0:0.7.0-1.f`"

This is on purpose because it is a progressbar. The whole one is:

[ 3/15] Upgrading python3-proton-core-0:0.7.0-1.f 100% |   3.6 MiB/s | 438.8 KiB |  00m00s

Would you rather see wrapping to multiple lines? Like:

[ 3/15] Upgrading python3-proton-core-0:0.7.0-1.f 100% |   3.6 MiB/s | 438.8 KiB |  00m00s
        fc44

I'm not sure this ever change because of pathological cases like if only a single column left for the package name. Then the output would span over multiple lines, each having only a single character.

* "`Warning: The unit file, source configuration file or drop-ins of me.proton.vpn.split_t`"
* "`Removed '/etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/me.proton.vpn.split_tunneling.ser`"

This was fixed in dnf5-5.3.0.0. You can work around it by setting FORCE_COLUMNS environment variable to a number of columns you like.

[Ricky-Tigg]

I made several simulations in text editor in order to visualize several display cases to see what wrapping to multiple lines would cause in terminal, in outputs. I can now conceive the reason for being no motive to change the current state. dnf5-5.3.0.0 landing in stable Fedora will be a good day though.

[ppisar]

dnf5-5.3.0.0 landing in stable Fedora will be a good day though.

Well it won't go to now-stable Fedoras because 5.3.0.0 changed API and ABI. First Fedora receiving this version will be Fedora 44. And before you ask for backporting the fix, it's also impossible because this change itself breaks the API.