hi. i'd like to keep a copy of the list of AUR packages, version numbers, and descriptions on my machine. the list can be somewhat out of date (say, as of the last time i did "pacman -Syu", which, for me, is every week or two). my question is how to do it with minimal overhead? i know packages.gz. that will give me the list of packages. however, without the version numbers, i won't be able to tell whether my cached information for a given package is up to date or not. would it be possible to (put on the list to) provide at some point a "packages-versions.gz"? or, even, "packages-versions-descriptions.gz"? (though the former is probably of more general use.) below is my motivation for wanting this. apologies if i've missed some already existing way of doing this. cheers, Greg ---------------------------------------------------------------------- motivation: for the last several years i've been using a script i "wrote" (inspired by something similar from fink) that, from local information, lists available packages, install status, version numbers, and descriptions [1]. (i'm often in a disconnected, or badly connected, world, so i try to avoid relying on the web.) having converted recently to arch, i pulled my script up to pacman [2], and would like to do an aur version, as well. for "packages-versions.gz", i'd download that, then use the package names and versions to make queries to bring a local database up to date with what AUR has. i'd damp this process to once a week or so. (i've spent some time in the last week, offline, playing with figuring out how efficiently -- in terms of both number of requests and amount of [duplicated] data transmitted -- i can download all the information via repeated RPC searches on frequently-appearing search terms -- using packages.gz as a way of knowing all the entries. but, as fun as that is, it's a hack.) [1] https://github.com/greg-minshall/apt-list [2] https://gitlab.com/minshall/pac-list