[pacman-dev] when upgrading display versions

[Divan Santana]

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.

Greetings :)
--       
Divan Santana