Hi, recently bin86 was removed from base-devel group but the unique way I know to see this change is manually reading the pkg changelog in the arch site. The problem is simple, how to detect this change in pacman? For example, after a gnome upgrade, if a new package is added to gnome group I can do: pacman -S --needed gnome to install the missing package. But if a package is removed? How can I remove this package that doesn't belong to a group anymore? I hope you understand the question. Why not add metapackages (as for kde) for base, base-devel, gnome and gnome-extra that doesn't have this problem?
Even if it was removed from the group, it could still be needed on your system.
pacman -Qdt might be more useful than checking if package x is still in group y.
Yeah, obviously, but it's not this case. The point is that there isn't a way to detect packages that are removed from a group so you can easily remove it; or at least I don't know a method to do it.