powerpc-utils/lparstat: Output of lparstat -E

[Likhitha26]

The output of lparstat command is not well formatted. It looks like:

System Configuration type=Dedicated mode=Capped smt=Off lcpu=6 mem=5679104 kB cpus=0 ent=6.00

---Actual--- -Normalized- %busy %idle Frequency %busy %idle

---

0.00 0.01 2.33GHz[ 80%] 0.00 0.01

There is no gap between the units GHz and value in frequency and also the values are not aligned properly.After the changes the output of lparstat is as below:

System Configuration type=Dedicated mode=Capped smt=8 lcpu=4 mem=40770944 kB cpus=0 ent=4.00

---Actual--- ---Normalized--- %busy %idle Frequency %busy %idle 0.00 0.03 2.29 GHz [100%] 0.00 0.03

Signed-off-by: Likhitha Korrapati likhitha@linux.ibm.com Reported-by: Shirisha Ganta shirisha.ganta1@ibm.com Reviewed-by: Brahadambal Srinivasan latha@linux.vnet.ibm.com

[nathanlynch]

Thanks for your PR!

But I'm not sure about this.

• Certainly there's room for subjective preference, but it's common practice in such utilities to print value and units without intervening space. It doesn't really complicate parsing.
• The busy/idle columns may seem unaligned for low values, but what about when they reach 100?
• If the output of the tool is parsed by anything else, this change risks breaking that.

I'm not seeing much upside in merging this, unfortunately.

[nathanlynch]

Also I believe the use of tab characters isn't appropriate for alignment of the output, since how they are rendered will depend on the user's terminal settings.

[Likhitha26]

I agree. Customers may be using these tools output in their automated code to make decisions. Tabs and spaces may mess up things based on what customer is using. I can work on the patch to avoid tabs, but do we want to still pursue this patch?

[nathanlynch]

Sorry, no, I don't see a reason other than preference to change the existing behavior, and IMO that's not enough justification. @tyreld thoughts?

[tyreld]

I see no justification to change the current formatting.