On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 9:38 AM, Divan Santana <Divan@s-tainment.co.za> wrote:

Hi Pacman Devs,

Hope this is the correct place to ask such a question...

I'm new to Arch Linux and loving the Arch so far.

I'm impressed and pleasantly surprised by pacman as a package management system.

One thing that would be nice, and I think it's in line with The Arch Way (openness perhaps ;) is when updating to display(or be able to display) the versions of the packages being upgraded. I know one sees the new version being installed but not the currently installed version so one can quickly compare before proceeding/deciding to upgrade.

I know one can easily achieve this with queries and small scripts(such as below) but it would really be quite nice to pass a pacman parameter and be able to see the output. I think it's quite important as Arch being a rolling distro sometimes you get major updates of packages and it would be nice to see straight away which are major updates and which are minor.

Script to do this I use is: for package in `pacman -Qu | awk {'print $1'}`; do echo "`pacman -Q $package` to `pacman -Si $package | grep Version | awk {'print $NF'}`"; done

Other package management programs + arguments that do this is: zypper -v up apt-get dist-upgrade -V

Anyway it's a minor thing perhaps the best is to log a feature request at https://bugs.archlinux.org ? Better(and also in line with the Arch Way) would be contribute the code and not request it but unfortunately I can't help with that since I know so little programming. You mean like this? https://bugs.archlinux.org/task/15772

-Dan