[pacman-dev] [IDEA | WHISH] Give pacman the ability to fetch latest news from website before critical updates/upgrades

[Lukas Fleischer]

On Tue, Jul 17, 2012 at 03:23:12AM -0300, Martin Cigorraga wrote:
> Hi guys!
> 
> I was thinking it could be a cool feature if pacman can warn the user every
> time news are published on our main page by issuing an alert when:
> 1. issuing a pacman -Syu  -- which involves full system upgrade
> 2. issuing a pacman -S {package}  --  providing the package being installed
> or upgraded is named in the latest news.
> 
> Furthermore, the alert type could be customized within pacman.conf to show
> a simple alert message, to actually show the full news or to not show
> anything at all:
> 1. Simple message example: "There are some important news you should be
> aware, please consider visiting: http://www.archlinux.org/\n\n", or "[...]
> please consider visiting Arch Linux front page.", etc. I myself prefer the
> first option since most X consoles/terminals can convert the url to a
> clickable link.
> 2. Full news shown: "Latest news from 2012-07-14: The /lib directory
> becomes a symlink\nAll Arch Linux packages have had their files in[...]"
> 
> A flag in -for example- /var/lib/pacman/sync can be set once the warning or
> full news are displayed to avoid showing them again if there isn't fresh
> news to show.

Isn't that what pacmatic [1], [2], [3] does? :)

> 
> I want to make it clear I _do_ check out our front page regularly, I do
> navigate the forums and I do read our mailing lists for both request help
> myself and -to try- to help fellow archers as much as my meager free time
> let me do that, but I still think this would be a great addition to pacman
> than can make its use a smoother and streamlined experience.
> 
> Please let me know ff this list isn't the right place to post this feature
> request so I can post it again in the right place.
> Best wishes,
> Martín Cigorraga
> 
> -- 
> -msx

[1] http://kmkeen.com/pacmatic/
[2] https://github.com/keenerd/pacmatic/
[3] http://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/any/pacmatic/