[arch-general] new arch user, questions about package management

Dave Heistand dheistand at challiance.org
Wed Jun 11 11:25:35 EDT 2008


On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 03:40:11PM +0200, Dennis Herbrich wrote:
> > What I'm looking for is a way to see a diff of my package cache prior to
> > and just after syncing, i.e. what packages are out of date (which pacman
> > does show), what packages have been removed from the repositories since my
> > last sync and what packages have been added to the repository since my
> > last sync.
> 
> To my knowledge, no developer supported package doing this is available,
> but there may be very well a host of shell scripts in one of the TURs
> fulfilling your requirements, more or less (likely less ;]). Some CVS
> magic on the ABS-tree may be the way to go, though, it's all in there. You
> just need to keep/extract the date of your last sync operation.

Thanks for the fast reply!

I may have not been clear in my description.  A diff of a snapshot of my
local package tree/database (what pacman -Ss uses) prior to syncing and
then a diff my local package tree/database after.

Such a diff would tell me things like (output 

Packages removed from package tree/ftp servers:
firefox (installed)
foobar (not installed)

Packages added to tree/ftp servers
iceweasel (not installed)
tmpwatch (not installed)

Packages that need to be upgraded
xorg (installed version 1, available version 1.2)
cowsay (similar to above))
sysstat (similar to above)

No big deal if there is no tool, I'll just need to check out the
packages web page more often.

> http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Custom_local_repository
> 
> I've looked over it right now, and this is the way to go, using repo-add
> and repo-remove.

Perfect! Thanks again!




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